Tarek Atoui (born 1980) is a contemporary artist and composer who is currently living 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.
Biography
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 an artistic director at STEIM, a center for electronic performance arts in Amsterdam. In 2010, he performed his first solo exhibition entitled Un-drum 3 where he used his own body efforts to trigger sound effects. Since then, Tarek Atoui explored the possibilities of sound experimentation all over the world through his solo exhibitions, and in collaboration with sound artists, composers and instrument makers.
Selected works
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 during the 8th Berlin Biennale in 2014, when Atoui invited musicians to improvise on historical instruments from the collection of the ethnological museum in Berlin. Next, the recordings from these performances were passed on to instrument makers to develop new instruments that would allow the recreation of 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. The collection was activated in several performances which Atoui recorded. It was completed 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. In an interview with Nadine Khalil for Ocula Magazine, the artist described how the work was involved 'with how objects, shapes, and functions could change with oral transmission.'
WITHIN (2016) For his project WITHIN, Tarek Atoui has been working with people who are deaf and hard of hearing since 2012. The project aims to explore the modes of tactile, physical, gestural and visual sound perception, and develop instruments that can be played by deaf as well as by hearing people.
WITHIN questions the act of listening and the way instruments are built, 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 a 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.