The Lebanese-French artist and composer Tarek Atoui invites us not to separate music from the world. He creates instruments out of glass, water, ceramics, metal and air, turns architecture into a resonating body, and invites people to listen not only with their ears.
13 October 2026 Atoui will unveil a new sound installation in the Turbine Hall of London's Tate Modern — one of the largest and most unusual exhibition spaces in the world.
There will be no familiar stage with a work completed before the audience arrives.
The space will become an instrument. The visitor — a participant.
And listening — a way of interacting with the world.
A hall that cannot be silenced
The Turbine Hall at Tate Modern is a former industrial space as tall as a multi-storey building. Tourists, school groups, families and casual visitors pass through it every day. Here people talk, laugh, run, stop and move on again.
For a traditional concert, such an environment would be a serious problem. The hall has too many reflections, unpredictable noises and constantly moving people.
But Atoui does not seek to achieve sterile silence or to reproduce a predetermined performance. He is interested in the very process of sound coming into being — the encounter between instrument, room and the person present.
So the noise of the hall does not necessarily become an obstacle. It can enter the overall sound as another fully fledged participant.
The exact design of the new installation has not yet been revealed. Until the opening, the artist deliberately keeps its details secret. It is known that this will be a work created specifically for the Turbine Hall and exploring the connection between sound, vibration, architecture and the audience.
The exhibition will run until 11 April 2027 and will become the eleventh project of the annual Hyundai Commission programme. Over the past decade, works in this series have been seen by more than 19 million people. The Guardian
Instruments that did not exist before
Tarek Atoui was born in Beirut in 1980, studied experimental music in France, and today lives and works in Paris.
Instead of limiting himself to releasing albums and concert tours, he began to explore the very nature of listening. Together with engineers, craftsmen, musicians and artists, Atoui creates unusual instruments that resemble mechanisms, sculptures and living organisms all at once.
His previous projects have used:
- glass, water, stone, ceramics and metal;
- air currents and acoustic chambers;
- motors and electronic sensors;
- computer-generated sounds;
- recordings of ports, seas and industrial spaces;
- human touch, breath and movement.
Some devices must be set in motion by hand, while others respond to air or a motor impulse. Some can be perceived as sculptures while they are silent, but the moment they are activated they begin to reveal space through sound.
Atoui does not simply invent unusual timbres. He explores what exactly makes an object an instrument.
Perhaps it is not only an object that becomes an instrument, but the entire system of relationships: material, touch, room, listener and attention, joined together in a single event.
One can hear not only with the ears
One of the most important experiences for Atoui was working with students at a school for the deaf in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.
The classes used low frequencies that can be felt with the body. The sound wave was perceived through vibration, pressure and the movement of material — without any need to hear it in the usual way.
This experience helped the artist see that there is no single universal way of listening.
People differ in their range of hearing, the structure of their bodies, their attention, their experience and their emotional state. One person notices a high frequency that another no longer perceives. A particular song can sound completely different in joy, in sorrow, or in the silence after an intense experience. A constant electrical hum can remain unnoticed until someone draws our attention to it.
So it is not a single ear that listens.
It is the whole person who listens — their body, memory, emotions and focused attention.
The official description of the new project emphasises precisely this principle: Atoui's work expands the concept of sound beyond hearing and explores tactile and visual ways of perceiving it. The Guardian
A story recorded in water
In the project Waters’ Witness — “Waters’ Witness” — Atoui explored the soundscapes of port cities, including Athens, Beirut, Abu Dhabi, Istanbul, Porto, Singapore and Sydney.
The recordings were made near the coast, underwater and next to urban infrastructure. In this way, acoustic layers usually inaccessible to human attention were revealed: the movement of vessels, the operation of machinery, underwater impulses, military activity and the voices of the environment itself.
The artist combined these recordings with marble, metal, ceramics and stone, turning the collected sounds into a spatial experience.
Here water became not a backdrop but a carrier of memory. It preserved the traces of human activity, the movement of the city and the history of a place.
Thus a different form of documentation emerged: the past can not only be read or looked at — it can be heard in the vibrations of space.
Not a concert, but a shared resonance
After the opening, the new work at Tate Modern will regularly be transformed into a venue for live improvisations.
The first two musical sessions are scheduled for 17 October 2026. Joining Tarek Atoui will be members of the Emptyset project, trumpeter and composer Mazen Kerbaj, multi-instrumentalist Kenichi Iwasa and singer Aya Metwalli.
Voice, electronics and acoustic instruments will enter into interaction with the installation itself. In one case, the musicians will be able to use it as a sound system; in another, as a set of instruments or a self-contained acoustic environment.
Consequently, the work will never sound the same twice.
The performers change. The listeners move about. The space responds to new impulses.
Each encounter creates its own version of the whole.
At the centre of the project are shared listening, improvisation and bringing people together around sound.
What does music remind us of?
We are not outside the world, nor do we observe it from an isolated point. Our steps already change its sound, our breath enters the common rhythm, and our attention reveals what had previously gone unnoticed.
We do not need to have a professional ear or know music theory to be part of this score. Every form of presence brings its own vibration to it.
No one is required to abandon their nature for the sake of unity. On the contrary, the shared sound becomes richer precisely because each person enters it with their own voice.
Music is born not when the world is forced to sound, but when its many voices are allowed to hear one another.
