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He is a Franco-Lebanese sound artist. Tarek Atoui's name and his universe circulate from Paris to New York, via Singapore and Berlin. Spotlight on an inventor who loves the effervescence of the stage as much as the research in his studio.
May 2021. A few days after the reopening of the cultural venues, Parisians were able to discover the famous Musée d'Art Contemporain at the brand-new Bourse du Commerce in the heart of the Halles district. Amongst François Pinault's collection of works of art, the first visitors were particularly impressed by an installation at the end of the tour: " The Ground", a series of musical ceramic sculptures by Tarek Atoui, which come to life in a play of echoes. Born in Beirut in 1980, Tarek Atoui is a poet-inventor - or the other way around - who has developed a dreamlike, unsystematic universe at the crossroads of composition, the plastic arts and new lutherie, always with a taste for performance and the present moment, shared with the public.
Tarek Atoui is an electro-acoustic composer who explores the notion of the musical instrument. What, after all, is an instrument? In 2008, Tarek Atoui was artistic director of STEIM in Amsterdam, the Dutch research and development center for new electronic musical instruments. This lover of the artisanal gesture designs sometimes disconcerting instruments, which he introduces to the public at concerts, conferences and workshops. Last season, he was guest artist at Marseille's Mucem.
Electronic devices and computers, yes, but not only. A keen ethnologist, Tarek Atoui likes to return to raw materials. Between 2014 and 2016, he conceived "The Reverse Collection": first, he invited musicians to improvise on ancient instruments from the collection of the Berlin Ethnological Museum. The session was recorded, and passed on to several luthiers, who developed eight new instruments to recreate these sounds... and imagine new compositions as part of sound performances. This collaborative work then travelled to Mexico City and London, at the Tate Modern.
" The Ground ", presented for the first time at the 2019 Venice Biennale, is a maze of wires, tree branches, pieces of drum kit, turntables playing ceramic records, sculptures, again in ceramics. In addition to music, of course, and economics, Tarek Atoui spent five years studying... agricultural and architectural practices! His interest in earth and form is reflected in his playful, sensual work, which titillates the imagination with a palette of subtle sounds, sometimes bordering on the inaudible. For the artist is more than ever attached to the perception of sounds and vibrations: a perception he has tirelessly questioned since his work, notably with the deaf and hard-of-hearing.
Suzanne Gervais
