Tarek Atoui Brings Bespoke Sonic Instruments to Tate Modern's Turbine Hall

A Sonic Commission in the Turbine Hall

Tarek Atoui has created a sonic installation for Tate Modern's Turbine Hall commission, an intervention conceived for the museum's vast atrium. The Lebanese artist and composer describes the space in his own framing: "I see the Turbine Hall as a sound vessel."

The project is built around bespoke instruments. These are not borrowed from an existing ensemble or orchestra; they have been made for the commission, and they respond to the specific acoustic and physical conditions of the Turbine Hall.

Instruments Made for the Space

The distinction matters. Atoui's practice sits at the intersection of contemporary art, composition and sound, and his Turbine Hall work extends that approach into one of the largest and most reverberant indoor spaces in contemporary museum architecture.

A space of that scale imposes its own terms on sound. The bespoke instruments are designed to engage with the atrium rather than to overcome it, turning its volume and resonance into material for the work.

The Turbine Hall commission is built around bespoke instruments created to respond to Tate Modern's atrium, the artist says.

Sound as Contemporary Art

The commission places sound art within the museum's high-profile Turbine Hall series, where monumental sculpture and installation have often dominated. Atoui's contribution shifts the register toward listening and acoustic experience.

For audiences, the work is experienced through hearing as much as through looking, a different mode of attention than the Turbine Hall's scale usually invites.

The commission also reflects the continued presence of sound and experimental composition within contemporary art programming, and within a museum context that has increasingly accommodated practices rooted in performance and audio.

What the Commission Signals

Tate Modern's Turbine Hall commissions carry weight in the contemporary art calendar, and the selection of an artist working primarily with sound points to the institution's willingness to treat acoustic practice as a central, rather than peripheral, form.

Atoui's framing of the hall as a vessel positions the architecture itself as an instrument. The bespoke instruments extend that idea into physical objects made specifically for the site.

The commission is grounded in the conditions of the Turbine Hall and the instruments Atoui has created for it. Its significance lies in that specificity: a sonic work made for a particular atrium, rather than adapted to it.