PETER KINGS
Zero Nuclear Weapons

Name: PETER KINGS
Start: 2022-09-24 00:00:00
End: 2023-02-22 00:00:00
Location: Nivola Museum

Nivola Museum

Orani, Sardinia, Italy

The show

The Nivola Museum is pleased to present the Pedro Reyes exhibition. Zero Armi Nucleari, the Mexican artist's first solo show in an Italian institution.The exhibition presents the developments of the Zero Nukes campaign, launched by the artist in collaboration with numerous institutions and figures from the world of art and science, to bring to the attention public the nuclear threat and put pressure on governments to reduce production and disarmament. Zero Nukes (2020) is an inflatable sculpture created as part of the Amnesia Atómica project, promoted by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a non-profit association created more than 70 years ago, in the aftermath of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to spread awareness relating to technologies that are potentially lethal to humanity.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was followed by decades of inattention and "collective amnesia". The nuclear threat, however, has never really disappeared, and with the Russian invasion of Ukraine it has returned to the center of global concerns. activists and organizations involved in the issue of disarmament, such as the Bulletin and the International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).

Reyes focuses on "Zero" as a graphic, visual and conceptual element common to all languages, used as a symbol of global unity for the only universally acceptable cause: avoiding the destruction of life on earth, and is inspired by design of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' iconic Doomsday Clock, created in 1947 by landscape artist Martyl Langsdorf (1917 - 2013), wife of the physicist and founding member of Bulletin Alexander Langsdorf. The clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world's vulnerability to catastrophe caused by nuclear weapons, climate change and disruptive technologies. On display, it is displayed in the form of a luminous sign and set at 100 seconds at midnight according to scientists' calculations - the closest point to the apocalypse from both creation to the end of World War II.

The slogan “Zero Nuclear Weapons”, translated into a myriad of languages, is presented in hand-painted protest signs, blurring the line between art and activism. The reference is to the global protest against the arms race that began in 1958, which during thirty years of mass resistance, from the 1960s to the 1980s, prompted governments to drastically reduce nuclear arsenals. The exhibition includes protest garments produced by Mexican designer Carla Fernández, already used in a performance by the dance company Nohboards, an element that reaffirms the collaborative effort for global disarmament. The popular movement is also remembered through a photographic mural created in collaboration with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) using archive images relating to that global mobilization.

Recurring in cartels is the symbol of peace, used today in every pacifist context, but originally conceived as a symbol of opposition to nuclear weapons. It was in fact created by the designer and activist Gerald Holtom in 1958, reworking the semaphoric language to indicate the letters D and N. The symbol also appears on Stockpile, a sculpture composed of missile-shaped balloons, signed and numbered, which make reference to the 12,705 nuclear warheads existing in the world. A number of limited edition balloons will be given away to the public in exchange for a social media post, inviting the public to symbolically dismantle global nuclear stocks, while fueling attention on nuclear threats.