Tarek Atoui

Tarek Atoui (b. 1980, Beirut) is a composer and sound artist who works with innovative electroacoustic instruments. These are activated as part of installations to explore different methods of listening, composition, and performance.

Atoui often develops projects over many years within different cultural contexts, and with a vast range of collaborators. Sound is translated into energy, light and electricity, becoming an agent to play the instruments, inviting performers and audiences to tune into the spaces and the listening possibilities they offer.

For Yorkshire Sculpture International 2019, Tarek Atoui presented The Shuffle Orchestra, a series of two performances in which Atoui activated instruments newly made by a growing international network of instrument-makers. Each performance focused on the work of one of Atoui’s close collaborators, and involved people, artists and members of the sound community across Leeds and Wakefield. In Atoui’s practice, these performances are moments of experimentation and human encounter that will inform and inspire future work, including a major exhibition the artist is preparing in 2020 at the Sharjah Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates and the Castello Rivoli, Italy.

Atoui has presented work at Tate Modern as well as Sharjah Biennial 9 and 11, United Arab Emirates (2009 and 2013, respectively); the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2010); SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul, South Korea (2010); the Haus Der Kunst, Munich (2010); Performa 11, New York (2011); dOCUMENTA, Kassel, Germany (2012); Serpentine Gallery, London (2012); Berlin Biennale (2014); and most recently NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore (2018) and Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2018).