Pedro Reyes

Pedro Reyes has won international attention for large-scale projects that address current social and political issues. Through a varied practice utilising sculpture, performance, video, and activism, Reyes explores the power of individual and collective organisation to incite change through communication, creativity, happiness, and humour. A socio-political critique of contemporary gun culture is addressed in Reyes’s ongoing Palas por Pistolas, in which the artist worked with local authorities in Culiacán, Mexico, to melt down guns into shovels, then used to plant trees in cities elsewhere in the world. Similarly, in Reyes’ major continuing Disarm series, firearms confiscated by the Mexican government and donated to Reyes have been transformed into instruments, which are then activated by local musicians.

Issues of community and compassion are addressed in Sanatorium, activated at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (2011), dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel, Germany (2012), The Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2013) and at The Power Plant in Toronto and The Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami (2014). In this work, visitors are invited to sign up for a ‘temporary clinic,’ with the mission of treating various kinds of urban malaise. His immersive exhibition Doomocracy, organised by Creative Time at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, was a ‘political house of horrors’ marking the confluence of two events haunting the American cultural imagination at the time: Halloween and the 2016 US presidential election. Most recently, Reyes has worked with The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and ICAN to stage anti-nuclear protests and performances across the world, for Amnesia Atómica ZERO NUKES.