‘Not too worried’ … Tarek Atoui in the Turbine Hall. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian View image in fullscreen ‘Not too worried’ … Tarek Atoui in the Turbine Hall. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian Tate Modern Play that funky Turbine Hall! How artist Tarek Atoui aims to take the Tate on a sonic odyssey From underwater explosions to PlayStation joysticks, the Lebanese artist makes art inspired by sound. Can this work in a space known for its chattering day-trippers, overstimulated schoolkids and echoing acoustics?
Prefer the Guardian on Google T arek Atoui is drumming the fingers of his right hand against the table. Listen! His left hand waves a cigarette at the surrounding world. So I listen. I can hear a busker on the riverside in front of Tate Modern and the hum of people walking the promenade. The low rumble of a plane flying over London and the wash of a boat under the bridge. You can identify a city by how it sounds, the artist is telling me, as much as by how it looks. And not only that! You can play a city, just like he is playing the table, so that it sings.
This is what Atoui, a musician and an impresario as much as an artist, does. He listens to the world around him, then he coaxes a tune out of it. Previous exhibitions have resembled recording studios in the midst of an especially far-out improvisation session, littered with instruments seeming to have been built out of scavenged materials on the instructions of a dream: someone might be playing a tentacular wind organ; wires might snake across the floor from a bleeping synthesiser; a glass booth may function like a walk-in flute, whistling around your body; marble boulders could emit woozy pulses, while drums beat to shifting patterns and your footsteps are picked up by microphones and fed back into the music. A world in miniature, made of sound.
View image in fullscreen ‘A realm in which people can listen, can play’ … the Turbine Hall undergoes a transformation for Atoui’s work. Photograph: Amer Ghazzal/Shutterstock Tate Modern’s cavernous Turbine Hall – with its shifting audience of chattering day-trippers, overstimulated schoolkids and echoing acoustics – strikes me as a daunting venue for any artist working with sound. But Atoui, whose latest work is about to fill this space, is not “too worried” about these unpredictable elements, because his creations are less about the “ideal execution” of a finished piece of music than about giving a stage to the process. Transforming this enormous hall into one of his trademark “places for listening and playing” (ahead of the opening, he can’t divulge details) would mark only “the latest stage” in the movement of his work away from concert halls and “on to the street and into the market”.
I want to encourage people to play in their own lives It’s been a winding road. Having left Lebanon to study experimental music in France, Atoui fell under the spell of experimental composers such as Iannis Xenakis and György Ligeti. But this charming and inveterately curious figure “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. One model for this way of living (and making art) was provided by Fluxus, a global network of artists and musicians that in the 1960s was heavily influenced by the composer John Cage. It’s a reminder that the open field of contemporary art has long offered space to musicians whose work…