The Beirut-born artist and composer Tarek Atoui—known for his innovative performances featuring intricately engineered instruments—will take over Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall this autumn (13 October-11 April 2027).
Atoui will create the next Hyundai Commission in the vast cathedral-like gallery that has previously hosted works by artists such as Kara Walker, Cecilia Vicuña and Olafur Eliasson. The Northern Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara’s installation Goavve-Geabbil is currently on show in the space (until 12 April).
According to a Tate statement, Atoui draws on extensive research into music history, instrumentation and production, creating “multisensory environments that re-think how we understand and experience sound”. In 2016, he created a series of new music performances in Tate Modern’s South Tank entitled The Reverse Collection 2016. At the 2019 Venice Biennale he presented The Ground, a work focused on contemporary and traditional musical practices developed in the Pearl River Delta region of China.
Last year Atoui launched shows at the TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary gallery, Madrid, and at HangarBicocca in Milan which was reviewed in ArtForum by Cornelia Lauf: “No matter how dramatically construed the performance may appear onstage, the art is in the composition, even if [Atoui] implicitly questions authorship by allowing algorithms to generate scores,” she wrote.
In an interview in Frieze magazine, Atoui describes how his practice developed: “In the early 2000s, after graduating from the Conservatory of Reims, I began working with electronics—computers, MIDI controllers, sensors—and learning how to improvise, which was a lot of fun. I also did a residency in 2006 at Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music [STEIM] in Amsterdam.”
Asked about his different roles, as a conductor and performer for instance, he adds: “Sometimes I’m hosting; sometimes I’m performing; sometimes I’m just giving instructions. It’s about wearing all these different hats. Sometimes I also have to step in and be the guy who says, ‘Okay, this is how we’re going to do it.’ So, it’s not totally open, but it is about being hospitable and trying as much as possible to create a space in which everybody can feel like they are in the right place.”
Catherine Wood, the interim director of Tate Modern, says in a statement: “Blending music, technology, sculpture and performance, [Atoui] is a truly cross-disciplinary artist whose work references current social, historical and political realities. Architectural space plays an important role in Atoui’s ongoing investigation into sound and vibration, and we can’t wait to see how he engages with audiences within the public space of Tate Modern's iconic Turbine Hall."
Meanwhile Tate’s chair of trustees, Roland Rudd, floated offering naming rights to the Turbine Hall last summer for upwards of £50m according to a report in the UK newspaper, The Telegraph. Asked to confirm the £50m figure, a Tate spokesperson says: “That comment was speaking in hypothetical terms.”
Last year Tate and Hyundai Motor announced a decade-long extension of their sponsorship partnership, which covers the Hyundai Turbine Hall commission and the Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational until 2036.
