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? Listen!

Tarek Atoui is drumming the fingers of his right hand against the table. 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. Continue reading...