Hyundai Commission: Tarek Atoui

Tarek Atoui is a sound artist and composer whose installations change how we experience sound, not only through our ears but through our whole bodies. For the Hyundai Commission, Atoui transforms the Turbine Hall into a vast sonic landscape, bringing ancient families of instruments into dialogue with electronic technologies. Inspired by the unique acoustic and spatial properties of the Turbine Hall, the commission builds on decades of Atoui’s collaboration with instrument-makers, researchers, engineers and musicians.

Wind is channelled through a suspended network of bamboo pipes, playing shengs, mouth organs from China and Southeast Asia, in chorus. Korean drums struck by mechanised mallets are dispersed throughout the space alongside Uzbek karnai horns and 3D-printed horns made from sugar resin and bamboo dust. Textiles up to 30 metres long oscillate in response to wind currents of the Turbine Hall. Each material generates and transmits sound in a different way. Microphones embedded within the installation sample the sounds of the instruments and the Turbine Hall itself. Custom software developed by the artist reworks these sounds and plays them back into the space alongside the instruments, so the soundscape is always changing and no two visits are the same.

Atoui invites visitors to wander at their own pace, sit or lie on stones placed along the ground, and experience them vibrate with sound. Building on childhood memories of time spent under vine-covered canopies and sheltered courtyards across the Mediterranean, Atoui imagines the Turbine Hall as a space of gathering and exchange.

Hyundai Commission: Tarek Atoui is in partnership with Hyundai Motor. Supported by the Tarek Atoui Supporters Circle and Tate Americas Foundation.