The unseen conductor
Tarek Atoui is a visual artist and musician interested in the corporal experience of sound and listening.
By Anna Seaman
The first sound as you step into Bait Al Serkal is a deep bass pulsing like a heartbeat, not loud enough to be intrusive but certainly enough to warrant attention. Emanating from an initially unidentified source it invites you to find out where it is coming from. You feel you’ve entered a living, breathing organism. The magical, mystical 19th century building, one of Sharjah Art Foundation’s star venues, seems to have acquired a heart, lungs and pulse with the exhibition Tarek Atoui: Cycles in 11.
The exhibition centres around sound, be that experimental music, innovative instruments, or the resonance of natural and man-made materials. And, while it comprises several separate artworks, the show feels intertwined and connected as a single body of work, sliding perfectly into its chosen venue. Bait Al Serkal’s many rooms, hidden crooks and crevices lend themselves perfectly to this exhibition.
Atoui was born in Beirut in 1980 and moved to France in his late teens to write and compose electronic music. In 2009, he transitioned to visual arts and now hovers above an invisible line dividing the two genres. He experiments with sound and collaborates with artists, musicians and instrument makers to create pieces. In August, Atoui was awarded the 2022 Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize, one of the largest art prizes in the US, and has a show scheduled in Austin, Texas for spring 2022. But it was Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF) that gave Atoui his first platform, at the bien- nial in 2009, and has continued to host performances, workshops and experimental partnerships. Notably, in his 2012 project Within, he worked closely with hearing-impaired students from Al Amal School for the Deaf in Sharjah to use sound as a means of communication.
Within forms a pivotal part of this exhibition. Indeed, many of the works in Tarek Atoui: Cycles in 11, which was delayed from March 2020 until September due to the coronavirus, stem from this seminal work. The exhibition pays homage to the ongoing collaboration with SAF.
“A lot of my experimentation and research has started in Sharjah or is triggered by opportunities that the foundation gave me,” Atoui says. “This was the opportunity to give something back.”
The artist performs at the opening of Tarek Atoui: Cycles in 11. Sharjah Art Foundation, 2020. Photo: Shanavas Jamaluddin / Sharjah Art Foundation.
Tarek Atoui: Cycles in 11 is more than an exhibition. It is an immersive experience to be seen, heard and felt with the entire body, aligning with a foundational part of Atoui’s research: the 11-beat irregular yet rhythmic cycle of some forms of Arabic music, specifically the Taarab genre. Pulses in 11, an “abstract pointillist clock”, is inspired by this research. It consists primarily of a large glass pipette filled with water and attached to a microphone stand. The water falls, in individual droplets, from the pipette into a smaller water basin linked to a speaker that produces a booming thud in an 11-beat cycle. This work acts as the heart of the show and also as its timekeeper.
“It comes from the idea of a metronome, giving the tempo and the pulse of the piece as well as marking an abstract rhythm cycle of 11 beats,” Atoui says. “However, it is a trance-inducing beat with no beginning and no end. It is hypnotic, you get lost in it. It is a play on many things, but it announces the colour, the structure and the ideas that are within the wider exhibition.”
As an anchor for the show, then, it is at once precise but abstract and, because it is such, it captures another important element of this presentation: the collision of the natural and the unnatural. Similar to the way Pulses in 11 uses water to create sound, most of the other pieces use natural elements such as stones, rocks, bones and wood to reverberate against different surfaces—cymbals, wood blocks, tiles, slate, even the ground—to make their music. It seems, initially, as if Atoui is exploring an interest in what happens when two contradictory spheres of existence collide. However, it is actually the opposite.
“There is no dichotomy,” Atoui says. “From the ancestral and prehistoric to the super high tech and algorithmic, everything is in symbiosis. Rather than opposition or contrast, they are all part of the same body coexisting at an equal level.
“If there is a statement behind this then it is about producing sound and making music. It is not about genre, temporality, technique, virtuosity or professionalism. It is about all these things together and what happens when you have all these elements in play.
Tarek Atoui: Cycles in 11 is more than an exhibition. It is an immersive experience to be seen, heard and felt with the entire body. Installation view, 2020. Photo: Omar Rasheed / Sharjah Art Foundation.
The works in the exhibition represent the culmination of Atoui’s ongoing exploration of different methods of listening, composition and performance. The spark of most of the pieces began in 2012 with Within, for which Atoui developed musical instruments for both deaf and hearing persons as well as exercises that can activate the whole body in the art of deep listening. In Cycles in 11, one room is given over to the Within project, filled with consistent sound. Inside the long, corridor-like space, the floor is covered in bean bags, tubes, pipes and wires connected to three separate artworks that create sounds. The central piece fills up with air—it resembles breathing lungs. The work layers physical and intellectual complexity, addressing subjective and objective listening for the professional ear, yet it also allows anyone of any age to enjoy.
“Whether you are one metre or seven metres tall, sound will flow to you in different ways. You can see it with your eyes through motion and objects and you can feel it by sitting on it or experiencing vibration. It is a listening experience,” Atoui says.
The Wave, which occupies the central courtyard of Bait Al Serkal, is constructed of the instruments developed for Within as well as others from two separate projects, The Reverse Collection and The Ground—another long-term venture that evolved from five years of research in southern China. It also uses sound recordings made for I/E, Atoui’s project on harbour cities (Abu Dhabi, Athens and Singapore) that he began in 2014. Its inspiration comes from the soundscape of the seashore when a wave crashes upon the beach and then recedes. The loudest instrument in The Wave is formed of black tubes that reach out like long limbs along the ground and rise up to emit their sound. Around this piece, which is called The Horns of Putin, and partly hidden in the undergrowth are smaller pieces that make their own noises. It is as if an orchestra is at work. That would make Atoui the unseen conductor.
“I prefer to say I am a composer,” he responds. “I am working on combining sounds with moments of performance and moments of research. But I am also a connector, a facilitator, an educator, and an agitator and when all this comes together, that is what makes a great project. So yes, I am definitely a conductor as well.”
TOP PHOTOGRAPH OF TAREK ATOUI BY OLI COWLING / TATE PHOTOGRAPHY
