Tarek Atoui's Turbine Hall Rains Musical Instruments — SkimNews
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- Tarek Atoui, the Lebanese artist, has installed wide water basins, rough-hewn rocks, and enormous brass trumpets suspended from the Turbine Hall roof girders
- The installation generates a continuous sonic collage of earth-shaking bass notes, drumbeats, and a woman's plangent, melancholic singing voice
- The reviewer links Atoui's sculptural sound machines to Leonardo da Vinci's invented instruments — including water-powered organs and a string instrument shaped like a fantastic beast
- The piece's trance-inducing, ecstatic quality is explicitly compared to Sufi dervish drumming, framed as a central reference rather than a passing nod
- An electric guitar was performed live at the press view, layering a human performer into what is otherwise an entirely sculptural soundscape
- Sounds and sights across the space evoke Lahore, Marrakesh, and an Istanbul market for the reviewer, conjuring a labyrinthine city whose towers 'fly in the air'
- Atoui's installation dissolves the material objects into pure vibration, leaving the audience soothed and at peace — what the reviewer calls 'a Turbine Hall installation to lose yourself in for hours'
Why it matters: The Turbine Hall is Tate Modern's signature commission for living artists, and Atoui stakes a claim for non-Western and historical musical lineages — from Sufi dervish drumming to Leonardo's fantastical instruments — as legitimate architectural sources for the museum's most public platform. By making raw sound the primary medium in a space built for visual spectacle, the commission reframes what a Turbine Hall piece can be.
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