Tarek Atoui

Tarek Atoui is a musician and an artist. He has already performed twice in Bregenz and with great success: in 2017 at KUB’s twentieth anniversary celebration and in 2018 as part of the Talks on Music and the Arts project series. For his performances, he collaborates with musicians and amateurs. These collaborations—public interventions or workshops with sound pieces—are explorations of sound phenomena. Atoui explores music history, acoustic vibrations, and the interplay of body and sound. He is particularly interested in the development of new instrumentation. He constructs novel sound objects, instruments, and listening aids. In the process, he creates original solutions that evolve; they learn from the space in which their sound originates and from the hands operating them.

On his travels, Atoui explores regional cultural traditions, which he incorporates into his works, for instance, combining sounds from different port cities with characteristic objects from the places. For the Serralves Museum in Porto in 2022, he combined sounds of the city’s port with wooden containers for compost, enhanced with marble figures made and sold at the port of his hometown Beirut, where a destructive explosion occurred on August 4, 2020. The project is part of his Waters’ Witness series, an immersive soundscape that connects the identities of port cities from Athens to Abu Dhabi and was exhibited in ever-changing versions, in addition to the Serralves Museum, at the Fridericianum in Kassel in 2020, at Mudam and Park Dräi Eechelen in Luxembourg, 2022–23, and in MCA Sydney, 2023. Along with on-site research, Atoui’s works include historical investigations. Reversing the order in which instruments are normally created, Atoui takes the sounds of ethnic instruments from the Musical Instruments Museum in Berlin as a starting point to develop novel instruments. He also works with electroacoustic experiments and computer systems that connect with listeners and musicians to synthesize previously unknown sounds. This involves playful experimentation and a musical experience that conveys spontaneity and a sense of the now. Characteristic for him are situations that are open to the unexpected and incorporate performative elements as an irritation. Atoui thinks of music as changeable, as something that is inspiring and is inspired. The artist explains, “It’s about giving things the opportunity to change and adapt to their time and place.” Kunsthaus Bregenz, with its acoustically sensitive spaces, is an ideal sounding board for Atoui’s work.

Tarek Atoui (b. 1980, Beirut) lives and works in Paris as a musician and sound artist. He studied contemporary and electronic music at the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional in Reims and was an artist-in-residence at the New Museum in New York. The musician participated in documenta 13 with a work that was inspired by Erkki Kurenniemi’s DIMI synthesizers. As an artist, Atoui has exhibited at institutions such as the Mudam Luxembourg, the Fondation Serralves, Porto, The Contemporary Austin, the FLAG Art Foundation, New York, all in 2022, the Fridericianum, Kassel, and the Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, in 2020, the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore in 2018. His works are part of several collections, notably the Tate Modern Collection, London, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection, New York, the Nouveau Musée de Monaco Collection, the Pinault Collection, the Kadist Collection, the French national collection and the collection of the Sharjah Art Foundation.