Pedro Reyes' solo exhibition 'Return to Sender' at Museum Tinguely in Basel

17 June 2020

On 23 June, Pedro Reyes will open his solo exhibition, ‘Return to Sender’, at Basel’s Museum Tinguely on Wednesday 24 June. The presentation will feature Reyes’ major 2014 installation Disarm (Mechanized) II, as well as premiere three new Disarm music boxes.

Disarm (Mechanized) II relates to Reyes’s ambitious international project in which seized and subsequently destroyed firearms are used to fabricate musical instruments. The installation comprises six mechanized musical instruments, fabricated from parts of revolvers, shotguns, and machine-guns. These surreal and macabre instruments intermittently play in the exhibition space as musical automatons.

The Disarm Music Boxes, made from repurposed gun parts, play fragments of tunes by composers from the countries where the guns were produced. In this ‘upcycling process’, the artist is concerned with transforming instruments of death into musical instruments that stand for dialogue and exchange.

On these projects, Reyes writes: “Weapons are the rule of fear, and music is the rule of trust — both entail creativity and technology, but one is built to oppress others, and the other is a form of liberation. These sculptural operations are meant not only to transform matter, but to lead to a psychological transformation, and hopefully, a transformation of society.”

‘Return to Sender’ runs from 24 June – 15 November 2020. Find further information on Museum Tinguely's website.

Image: Pedro Reyes, Disarm Music Box (Glock/Mozart), Disarm Music Box (Beretta/Vivaldi), Disarm Music Box (Karabiner/Matter) (2020), Installation view Museum Tinguely, (l.t.r.) Courtesy of the artist © 2020 Museum Tinguely, Basel; Photo: Daniel Spehr, related to the artworks © Courtesy of the artist