From experimental instruments to architectural acoustics, the Lebanese artist explores how listening can alter our experience of bodies, spaces and environments
The sound artist and electroacoustic composer Tarek Atoui ushers me through an unmarked wooden door on a Parisian side street, down a gloomy stairwell and into his basement studio. With its massive limestone walls, vaulted ceilings and hopper windows, the sunken space resembles a cross between Edmond Dantès’s prison cell in The Count of Monte Cristo (1846) and an innovative music shop.
An enormous circular drum, bamboo pipes, brass horns, metal gongs, a double-necked violin and electrical devices are variously suspended from the ceiling and neatly arranged on the floor. It is a fitting metaphor for Atoui’s practice as a whole: a sonic laboratory in which different materials, instruments, digital processes and people are brought together in ephemeral ensembles.
For the past several months, Atoui has been developing his largest work to date, the Hyundai Commission for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, due to open this October. It’s a daunting prospect for any artist, but one rich in acoustic potential. As anyone who has visited it knows, the vast steel-and-concrete chamber – its ceiling soars 35 metres overhead – drenches visitors in echo and reverb. Sound has been central to other works produced for the series (Bruce Nauman’s 2004 piece Raw Materials, in which variously spoken, sung, muttered and ranted texts were amplified along the length of the concourse, is a notable example), but Atoui is the first sound artist and composer to take it on.
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