Hyundai Commission: Tarek Atoui opened in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall on 13 October 2026 and runs until 11 April 2027, with free admission. It is the 11th edition of the commission, and the first in a while where the primary medium is not visual.
Atoui, born in Beirut in 1980 and based in Paris, has spent more than two decades inventing and reinventing instruments, usually alongside craftspeople, engineers and composers rather than alone. Glass, water, ceramics and unorthodox mechanical systems recur in his work, sounding through touch, movement, breath or vibration. The Turbine Hall gives him the largest resonant cavity he has worked in.
Four families of instruments, chosen for the room
The instruments were selected for how they behave in this specific space — its height, its reverberation, its moving air.
Traditional Asian sheng are activated by computer-controlled air systems, replacing the player’s breath with a mechanism that can sustain a note indefinitely. Oversized Central Asian karnai horns were produced by 3D printing, which is the only practical way to make a horn at a scale no craftsperson has reason to build. Large Korean drums supply impact and low frequency.
The fourth family is the one that does something genuinely new.
Textiles as oscillators
Working with Satoshi Kondo and Issey Miyake, Atoui developed large fabric elements coated in conductive graphite paint. The coated textiles function as oscillators: as they move in the hall’s air, they generate sound.
This is a fabric that is not a speaker cone, not a sensor triggering a sample, and not a diaphragm being driven. It is a conductive surface whose own motion through space is the signal source. It sits in the small and growing body of work where the textile is the circuit rather than the housing for one — and it is the first time most Turbine Hall visitors will have heard one.
Elsewhere in the installation, stone slabs containing speakers transmit vibration directly through their surfaces, so visitors feel frequencies in their bodies instead of only hearing them.
Listening beyond hearing
The vibrotactile elements are not a novelty. They come out of Atoui’s long collaboration with deaf and hard-of-hearing communities, which has shaped his practice for years and produced a working position: that listening is not a single channel, and that a work composed only for ears has decided in advance who its audience is.
In this orchestra, as Tate puts it, the body becomes another way of listening. That reframing is what makes the stone slabs load-bearing rather than decorative.
A six-month composition, not a six-month exhibition
Rather than treating the Turbine Hall as a neutral container, Atoui uses its proportions, reverberation and atmospheric conditions as compositional material. Acoustic and electronic sound interacts with the building’s industrial character, and the instruments themselves form a visual landscape of pipes, drums, textiles and resonating surfaces — sculpture and sound equipment becoming hard to tell apart.
More than 40 musicians are expected to work with the installation across its run, improvising and introducing new arrangements. The piece evolves rather than looping. Catherine Wood, Interim Director of Tate Modern, has noted that architectural space is central to Atoui’s investigation of sound and vibration, which makes the museum’s vast public interior an unusually apt site.
The commission is curated by Nabila Abdel Nabi and Dina Akhmadeeva. Since launching, the Hyundai Commission series has drawn more than 19 million visitors; the Tate and Hyundai Motor partnership, established in 2014, was recently extended to 2036.
For a hall that has hosted a giant sun, a crack in the floor and a field of porcelain sunflowers, this is an unusual proposition: the most interesting thing in the room may not need to be looked at.