Tarek Atoui Fills Tate Modern's Turbine Hall With Bamboo Pipes, Drums and Humming Stones

The Turbine Hall has become a sound landscape. Tarek Atoui's Hyundai Commission opened at Tate Modern on 13 October and runs to 11 April 2027, free to enter, open 10.00 to 18.00 Sunday to Thursday and 10.00 to 21.00 on Fridays and Saturdays. It is the 11th in the series, and Tate's press release says the partnership has been extended to 2036.

Tate describes ancient instrument families combined with electronics. Wind is channelled through a suspended network of bamboo pipes that sound shengs and mouth organs from China and Southeast Asia. Korean drums are struck by mechanised mallets. There are Uzbek karnai horns, and 3D-printed horns made from sugar resin and bamboo dust. Textiles up to 30 metres long move with the hall's air currents.

The hall itself is part of the instrument: embedded microphones capture the instruments and the room, and custom software reworks those sounds and plays them back into the space. Visitors can sit or lie on stones placed on the floor that vibrate with sound.

Performances

A programme of free, ticketed performances runs through the commission. The first two sessions are on 16 and 17 October with Tarek Atoui, Emptyset, Mazen Kerbaj, Kenichi Iwasa and Aya Metwalli; the third, on 13 November, has Bendik Giske and Valentina Magaletti, and the series continues to April.

It is a commission about recording a room and playing it back into the same room, which is a problem every sound engineer meets on a small scale. Our guide to sound for video in a studio is about what a treated room does to what a microphone hears.