Tarek Atoui’s Improvisation in 10 days, an exhibition view at HangarBicocca, Milan, 2025, explores the artist’s experimental approach to sound and installation. Photo © Rasa Juskeviciute.
The Tarek Atoui installation at Tate Modern transforms instruments, textiles, and electronic systems into an evolving environment where the Lebanese-born artist makes sound a physical experience.
BY ARTCENTRON ARTNEWS DESK
Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall becomes an instrument in its own right with Tarek Atoui: Hold. The Tarek Atoui installation brings together sculptural objects, experimental music, and responsive technologies to transform the vast space into an immersive sound environment. It invites visitors to experience sound as a physical presence rather than something heard from a distance.
The exhibition marks the 11th Hyundai Commission, an annual project that invites artists to respond to the scale and industrial character of Tate Modern’s vast central space. The Tarek Atoui installation transforms instruments, textiles, and electronic systems into an evolving environment where sound becomes a physical, immersive experience.
For Atoui, sound does not exist independently of the materials and spaces that carry it. Instruments, textiles, air currents, and electronic systems interact throughout Hold. Their relationships shape an environment that changes over time.
Tarek Atoui Installation Reimagines Sound as Sculpture
Atoui approaches the Turbine Hall as an acoustic environment with its own physical conditions. Its height, airflow, and architectural surfaces become active elements in the work.
Suspended above the hall’s ramp, a ceremonial brass trumpet known as a karnai sits alongside two elongated, 3D-printed horns. At the opposite end, drum skins, gongs, bamboo structures, and shengs form a network of instruments. The sheng is a mouth organ associated with musical traditions across China and Southeast Asia.
Long textiles hang among these objects. Elsewhere, lithophone-like stones and warm lighting create places for visitors to pause. The arrangement encourages looking, listening, and attending to bodily sensations.
These elements do not function as separate sculptures arranged for visual effect. Instead, they form an interconnected system. Air moves through the instruments, while vibrations and electronic signals extend their activity across the hall.
The result challenges the conventional separation between an artwork and its surroundings. The architecture helps shape the sound, while the sound changes how visitors perceive the architecture.
This approach also recalls the broader development of installation art, in which space, movement, and audience experience become integral to a work. Artcentron has explored related questions in its coverage of immersive multimedia installations, where sound and visual structures transform the experience of a physical environment.
Traditional Instruments Meet Experimental Technology
Atoui’s practice draws on more than two decades of experimentation with musicians, instrument-makers, engineers, and researchers across Asia and Europe. He combines historical instruments with systems designed to expand their sonic possibilities.
For Hold, architecture firm Arthur Mamou-Mani helped produce 3D-printed horns from a composite material made with sugar resin and bamboo dust. Their elongated forms echo the karnai suspended elsewhere in the hall.
Tarek Atoui installation project also incorporates textiles supplied by Satoshi Kondo, designer of the ISSEY MIYAKE women’s line. Atoui coated the fabrics with conductive paint. A low electric current travels through the material to a synthesiser, generating bass tones as the textiles oscillate.
Air currents and humidity influence the fabrics’ movement. Environmental conditions therefore become part of the work’s composition.
Microphones embedded within the installation capture sounds from the instruments and the surrounding Turbine Hall. Custom software developed by Atoui processes these recordings and feeds them back into the composition.
The system introduces an element of unpredictability. Sounds emerge, shift, and overlap rather than following a fixed musical score. The installation remains open to improvisation, with the architecture and its changing conditions helping shape what visitors hear.
Atoui’s approach places him within a wider field of contemporary art that examines the relationship between technology, perception, and physical experience. Artcentron’s coverage of digital art and the changing role of technology in galleries offers further context for understanding this intersection.
A Shared Space for Listening and Encounter
The title Hold suggests an act of keeping, supporting, or sustaining. The installation’s arrangement also invites visitors to consider how people occupy space together.
Atoui has drawn on memories of gathering places, including sheltered courtyards and vine-covered canopies. These references inform his treatment of the Turbine Hall as a place for encounter and exchange.
Visitors can sit or lie down among the installation’s elements. They can look upward at suspended objects or attend to the sounds moving through the hall. The work does not prescribe a single route or listening position.
This freedom matters to the experience. Each visitor encounters the installation from a different physical position. The resulting perspective depends on proximity, attention, and the changing activity around them.
The work also brings together instruments associated with different musical traditions. Rather than presenting them as isolated cultural objects, Atoui places them within a shared experimental system. Their relationships become a starting point for listening across different histories and practices.
Sound thus becomes both a material and a means of connection. The installation asks how people might encounter unfamiliar sounds, spaces, and traditions without reducing them to a single interpretation.
Live Performances Activate the Installation
Hold will not remain a static installation. Tate Modern plans a series of live sound-based performances throughout the exhibition, with musicians interacting directly with its instruments and electronic systems.
The program includes instrumentalists, electronic artists, and experimental musicians from different backgrounds. Among the announced participants are Shakeeb Abu Hamdan, Lydd Adib, Nicolas Becker, Elvin Brandhi, Bendik Giske, Mazen Kerbaj, Valentina Magaletti, Nkisi, and Saadet Türköz.
The scheduled performances include October 16 and 17, November 13 and 27, December 11, January 15, February 19, March 19, and April 2. The listed sessions run from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. and are free.
A Tate Modern Late event on November 27 will add DJs, workshops, film screenings, and performances by Nkisi and Mhamad Safa. Tate will also offer free audio-description tours on selected dates for blind and partially sighted visitors.
The live program gives the Tarek Atoui installation another dimension. Musicians will activate its systems in different ways, creating performances that respond to the work rather than treating it as a conventional stage backdrop. Visitors should check the official Tate Modern exhibition and events page for program updates and booking information.
Tarek Atoui and the Changing Language of Contemporary Art
Born in Beirut in 1980, Atoui lives and works in Paris. His practice combines sound, performance, sculpture, and research into the history and production of music.
Atoui’s work has appeared at institutions including the Venice Biennale, dOCUMENTA 13, the Serpentine Gallery, and Tate Modern. His installations often challenge the assumption that sound belongs primarily to music or that listening depends exclusively on hearing.
Hold extends this inquiry into one of the most prominent exhibition spaces in contemporary art. The Turbine Hall has hosted commissions by artists including Kara Walker and Anicka Yi, whose works used its industrial scale to explore different relationships between sculpture, technology, and the environment.
The Hyundai Commission Continues at Tate Modern
The Hyundai Commission began in 2014 as part of Tate and Hyundai Motor’s long-term partnership. The organizations have extended their agreement through 2036. Tate reports that the commission has attracted more than 21.6 million visitors since its inception.
Atoui’s contribution shifts attention away from the monumental object as a singular visual spectacle. His installation instead develops through relationships among materials, instruments, architecture, and people. Its form emerges through sound, movement, and time.
That approach makes Hold a significant opportunity to consider how contemporary installation art can engage the senses beyond sight. It also raises questions about the boundaries between sculpture and music, the role of technology in artistic production, and the ways public spaces can encourage collective experience.
Exhibition details
Hyundai Commission: Tarek Atoui: Hold
- Dates: October 13, 2026–April 11, 2027
- Venue: Tate Modern, Bankside, London, SE1 9TG
- Admission: Free
- Opening hours: Daily, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.; until 9 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays
For additional information about the artist’s practice, visit Tarek Atoui’s official website. For exhibition details, consult Tate Modern.