Tarek Atoui’s large-scale sound installation for the 11th Hyundai Commission opens in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall on 13 October 2026 — experimental musical instruments, sculptural structures, and acoustic experiences that extend past conventional listening.
The framing is the interesting part: Atoui approaches the architecture itself as an instrument, exploring how sound travels through space, materials and the human body.
The commission’s own trailer.
The Turbine Hall has always been an acoustic problem
Every artist given this space has to deal with its scale. Most deal with it visually — the hall is 35 metres high and most Turbine Hall commissions are, first, large objects.
Dealing with it acoustically is harder and much less often attempted. A vast hard-surfaced industrial volume has an enormous reverberation time, strong and irregular early reflections off concrete and steel, and significant low-frequency modes set by its dimensions. Conventional amplified sound in that space turns to mush: anything with transient detail smears, anything with a fast rhythm becomes a wash.
So “the architecture as instrument” is not a metaphor here, it is the only workable strategy. You cannot impose a composition on a room like this and have it survive. You can write for the room — use the reverberation as a sustain pedal, place sources so the reflections become part of the material, pick frequencies the modes support rather than fight. The hall’s response stops being an obstacle and becomes the thing you are composing with.
The line in Tate’s own description — rather than simply filling the hall with music — is doing exactly this work.
Atoui’s practice: instruments, not compositions
Born in Beirut in 1980, based in Paris, Atoui has spent more than two decades working between music, sculpture and performance. The centre of the practice is the invention and reinvention of musical instruments, developed alongside craftspeople, engineers, composers and other artists.
His materials recur: glass, water, ceramics, and unconventional mechanical systems, producing sound through touch, movement, breath or vibration.
That list is worth reading as a technical choice rather than an aesthetic one. Glass, water and ceramic are all resonant, lossy and unpredictable — they ring, they damp irregularly, and they change behaviour with temperature, fill level and handling. An instrument built from them is not repeatable in the way a synthesiser is, which means a performance on one is a negotiation rather than an execution.
And the four excitation methods — touch, movement, breath, vibration — are all direct bodily actions, not interface actions. There is no keyboard in that list, no controller, no mapping layer. The body does something physical to a material and the material responds.
Atoui’s collaborative method matters for the same reason. You cannot invent an instrument in glass without a glassblower. A practice built on inventing instruments is necessarily a practice built on other people’s craft knowledge, and the credit list reflects that.
What makes it an installation rather than a concert
The stated aim is that audiences experience music as something physical and spatial, rather than something that simply reaches the ears, with listening becoming multisensory.
In a space this size, that follows from the physics. Where you stand changes what you hear, far more dramatically than in a concert hall — move ten metres in the Turbine Hall and you are at a different point in a different set of standing waves, with different distances to different sources. There is no optimal seat because there is no seat.
Which means the audience is doing the mixing by walking. That is the structural difference between a sound installation and a performance, and the thing that makes a space like this worth the difficulty.