Tarek Atoui

Tarek Atoui (born 1980) is a contemporary artist and composer, currently living and working in Paris.Based on research in music history and traditional music practices, his work reflects the notion of instrument, and how it interacts with listening, composing and performing.

Tarek Atoui was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1980. In 1998, he started composing electronic music and moved to France. In 2007 he worked as artistic director at STEIM in Amsterdam, a center for electronic performance arts. In 2010, he gave his first solo exhibition titled Un-drum 3, a musical performance using his own body efforts as a sound triggers. Since then, Tarek Atoui developed the possibilities of sound experimentation all over the world through his solo exhibitions and in collaboration with sound artists, composers and instrument makers.

The Reverse Collection (2014-2016)

The Reverse Collection is an ensemble of instruments that has been conceived in several steps. The project started with the Dahlem Sessions, at the occasion of the 8th Berlin Biennale in 2014, when Atoui invited musicians to improvise on historical instruments from the collection of the ethnological museum in Berlin.

The recordings from these performances were then passed on to instrument makers, asking them to develop new instruments that would allow to recreate these sounds. Eight instruments were constructed and exhibited in Mexico City at kurimanzutto in 2014, resulting in several performances and new compositions, called the Reverse Sessions.

The third and last step was presented as Reverse Collection in 2016 at Tate Modern in London with a new generation of ten instruments. Activated in several performances which Atoui recorded, the collection was completed at this occasion by a multichannel sound work in the exhibition space, that was evolving over the whole duration of the show and allowing multiple associations between object, sound, space and performance.

WITHIN (2016)

For his project WITHIN, Tarek Atoui has been working with deaf and hard of hearing persons since 2012, exploring modes of tactile, physical, gestural and visual sound perception, and developing instruments that can be played by deaf as well as by hearing people.

WITHIN questions the act of listening and the way we build instruments, conduct composition and improvisation, write scores and relate to an audience. The project was initiated in 2012 and has since then been enriched by the contribution of the curatorial duo Council. WITHIN evolved at the Sharjah Biennale (2013), the Berkeley Art Museum, the Experimental Music and Performing Art Center - New-York (2015), ZKM - Karlsruhe (2016), the Bergen Assembly (2016), the Galerie Chantal Crousel - Paris (2017), Garage - Moscow (2018), the Favoriten Festival - Dortmund (2018), and the Printemps de Septembre - Toulouse (2018).

The resulting collection of instruments that has been developed in collaboration with deaf and non-deaf students and volunteers, instrument makers, software engineers, speaker designers, and art educators can be activated in workshops, rehearsals and performances, but also as sound installation replaying some of the past performance recordings and offering new sounds methods of apprehending sound.

The Ground (2017, ongoing)

The Ground is the result of Tarek Atoui's trips and investigations over the period of 5 years, around the agricultural environment of Pearl River Delta (Guangdong, China). This research resulted, in collaboration with musicians and instrument makers, in a series of instruments presented at Mirrored Gardens (Guangzhou, China) in 2017. Each instrument has its own approach of being activated and all together they can be played autonomously in different sound situations to be experienced individually by each listener.

Each presentation of The Ground is punctuated with invitations to musicians and composers to activate and play the instruments in an experimental conversation to find new musical gestures and enrich the soundscape. In 2018 the project was presented in the exhibition The Ground, from the Land to the Sea at the NTU CCA Singapore. At this occasion a new series of porcelain and ceramic discs were created. The exhibition also featured selected instruments from The Reverse Collection and WITHIN. Additionally, the presentation in Singapore offered the opportunity for Tarek Atoui to complete his sound collection I/E with recordings of the Singapore shores, local harbors and waterfronts in cooperation with Éric La Casa, composer and sound artist. In 2019 The Ground is presented at the 58 Venice Biennale, in the International Art Exhibition May You Live In Interesting Times. For this exhibition, the instruments play autonomously in a composition constantly fed by their own sounds and vibrations, creating immersive soundscapes and engaging the act of listening.

• Un-drum 1, Sharjah Biennial 9, Sharjah, U.A.E. (2009)
• Visiting Tarab, Performa Biennial 12 (2011)
• dOCUMENTA 13, commission and residency for developing the Metastable Circuit, la Lutherie and Dimis Reconnected, Kassel, Germany. (2012)
• From Architecture. Quatre variations and Le Diapason à réponse infinie Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France. (2014, 2015)
• The Reverse Sessions, Kurimanzutto Gallery, Mexico City, Mexico. (2014)
  • The Reverse Collection, Tate Modern, London, U.K. (2016)
• WITHIN, first presented at the Sharjah Biennial 11 (2013), later made part of the Council art organization's Infinite Ear project. (2016)
• The Ground, Mirrored Gardens, Guangzhou, China. (2017)
  • The Ground: From the Land to the Sea, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, Singapore. (2018)
  • The Ground, at the International Art Exhibition entitled May You Live In Interesting Times, 58th edition of the Venice Biennale (2019)