Lebanese artist Tarek Atoui is set to transform Tate Modern's cavernous Turbine Hall into a sonic playground, a space known for its challenging acoustics and unpredictable audiences. His Hyundai Commission, opening 13 October, will turn the vast hall into one of his trademark "places for listening and playing," continuing his movement away from concert halls and "on to the street and into the market."
From Recording Studios to Turbine Hall
Atoui, a musician and impresario as much as an artist, listens to the world around him and coaxes tunes out of it. Previous exhibitions have resembled recording studios mid-improv, filled with instruments seemingly built from scavenged materials: tentacular wind organs, bleeping synthesisers, walk-in glass flute booths, marble boulders emitting woozy pulses, and drums beating to shifting patterns while footsteps are picked up by microphones and fed back into the music.
Despite the Turbine Hall's shifting audience of chattering day-trippers, overstimulated schoolkids and echoing acoustics, Atoui is not "too worried" about these unpredictable elements. His creations are less about the "ideal execution" of a finished piece than about giving a stage to the process.
A Career Shaped by Encounters
Having left Lebanon to study experimental music in France, Atoui fell under the spell of composers such as Iannis Xenakis and György Ligeti. But he "didn't want to work in the music industry," stuck on the treadmill of "making albums and touring." Instead, he wanted to travel, meet people and learn from these encounters, a model influenced by Fluxus, the 1960s network of artists and musicians heavily influenced by composer John Cage.
His career can be charted by the places he has been and the people he has met, from revered Korean drum-makers to Palestinian children in refugee camps, for whom he developed software to compose sound through PlayStation joysticks. Perhaps most transformative was his work with students at the Amal School for the Deaf in Sharjah, UAE, where he used bass speakers to play frequencies so low they are registered through the body. "I learned from working with deaf people that there is more than one way of hearing," he says.
Understanding the World Through Sound
Atoui's idea that we can "understand the world through sound" resonates with artists such as Lawrence Abu Hamdan, joint winner of the 2019 Turner prize. For his project Waters' Witness, Atoui records the ambient noise of seas surrounding harbour cities from Istanbul to Sharjah. Of Athens, he says, "the waters around the Battle of Salamis are quiet now," while Singapore's marina is busy with "underwater explosions, military exercises, the noise of ships in the bay." History is recorded in sounds as much as in pictures and words.
Atoui's exhibitions fulfil several functions: when no one is performing, the handmade instruments are sculptures; during improvisation sessions and workshops, the exhibition becomes something more like a "concert hall or educational space." Key is the idea that hearing cannot be separated from the other senses.
Audience as Collaborator
Atoui's most important collaborator is the audience. Visitors to his recent exhibition in Milan could stay for five minutes or an afternoon, sit still or move through a space crowded with sounds. The artist makes no attempt to "anticipate" or "determine" the visitor's experience. "I want to encourage people to play in their own lives," he says, hoping to transform the Turbine Hall into "a realm in which people can listen, can play."
Tarek Atoui's Hyundai Commission is at Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, London, from 13 October until 11 April 2027.
