Count Me In

ABBAS ZAHEDI I’m a huge admirer of your work. Few artists work with sound as powerfully or as rigorously as you do, and it has meant a great deal to me to follow your work over the years. I’d like to start with a simple question: what does it mean to work with sound in spaces traditionally built for a visual experience? How did you arrive at that approach?

TAREK ATOUI I came to it from music. In 2004, I took an electroacoustic music course, and this conceptual approach to sound allowed me to make my first composition, despite the fact that I didn’t come from a classical background or grow up playing instruments. Somehow, that got me closer to art. It felt like a very natural slide. It didn’t happen overnight, of course. It took several years, but I eventually found myself feeling freer and more at ease in the realm of visual arts. My art journey started with informal performances and live events in the late 2000s – there was no object making, no artefact. I was making my own instruments and interfaces purely to do performances with them. In a similar way, some of John Cage’s installations weren’t installations to him; they were compositions, but that required the building of certain artefacts or acoustic spaces.

AZ My journey also started in music and performance. I was born in London in the 1980s and grew up through the 1990s and early 2000s in Ladbroke Grove, where I was exposed to Jamaican sound system culture. In primary school, I played steel pan and later , after I left my career in medicine, I ran an open mic night and was part of spoken word and music events all over London, many of which had strong connections to the emergent genres of house music, UK garage and grime. That world was where I first understood sound as something social: a way of gathering people and holding a space together, and it was out of those encounters that I gradually found my way into art via members of the Blk Art Group, another British-Caribbean connection. Where did you grow up and what was that like?

TA I grew up in Lebanon and moved to Reims, France for university when I was 18. After I finished my studies there, I faced the choice: do I want to stay here, where there is a long history of support for music activity and arts, as well as established institutions and funding, or am I willing to go out and look for something else? I chose the latter, I went back to Lebanon, and to Egypt and Sharjah, where the culture of the sound system was very different, even non-existent in some cases. I was deliberately bringing something to the public, putting something out there rather than trying to optimise the existing working conditions and stay within a closed ecosystem.

AZ Being part of an immigrant community and diaspora in London, there was a lot of cultural overlap, which I’m sure was similar to your experience, having lived in many places: different communities living side by side, sharing music, food and language. I think sonic communication was a common language for many of us. You do public performance, which is increasingly becoming ararity as many grassroots spaces are closing down or are closed off, especially in the art world. I find this sense of openness a powerful aspect of your work. Was it a conscious decision to keep performing publicly?

TA Yes, it was a conscious thing. Because I came to sound practices later in my life, it made it easier – and more appealing – for me to share what I had learnt, and how to make things, in an accessible way. Over time, my work developed into those things you mentioned, Abbas: public performances and works that are porous in their identity and open to different types of interpretations.

AZ I saw your show Souffle Continu, Sunflowers (2026) at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), part of which was installed in IMMA’s Chapel. I went with a few people, and I felt for the first time that I was having a truly collective experience in a church. My friends and I walked through different parts of the installation, noticing various details: the very beautiful brass and copper fittings, the organ pipes. You could see people’s brains were attempting to decipher it all. They were trying tounderstand how it worked, and where the sound was coming from. At the same time, it felt deeply emotional, because church architecture is so acoustically rich. You created this really collective experience: the work didn’t sit apart from us to just be looked at; it placed us in relation to one another. Being among other people, listening together, felt crucial to its formal realisation. When you introduce sound into an artwork, I think you challenge the traditional idea of a museum as adetached, distanced space. But your sound work is also very material: you can see many of the musical elements, like the record players, the tapes that are extended, the microphones and studio equipment.

TA Absolutely. It’s a mix of many things. There are no distinctions between the objects and the techniques I use. For me, it all comes from juxtaposing things that wouldn’t normally belong together. The poetry emerges from these encounters: placing a tape within a looping system and building an instrument that engages with tape in a different way, then bringing that into dialogue with brass and copper plates which are turned into microphones. This process of transforming materials, techniques and ways of looking always creates something new. There is lots of playfulness in it too. In my case, a lot of things come from playing.

AZ I sense that. In your IMMA show, you created a playful environment without losing the atmosphere of the church as a solemn, sacred space, and a sonically resonant one too. You’ve created a kind of living system, something almost biological. How did you go about making that work?

TA Well, I put an organ in the church, which I thought was pretty fun and straightforward! But the story of this specific organ is what makes that work special and adds character to the space. It was made for a project I have been working on for the last 14 years called WITHIN, where I visit schools for deaf children. Together with kids in Strasbourg, we designed the prototype of the organ and then made it into a more complex instrument with an organ specialist. The idea came from an experimental organ pipe made by Johannes Goebel in the 1980s, which worked like a flute in that it allowed people to physically feel frequencies that are too low to hear. Goebel wasn’t deaf, and his instrument was made for minimalist musicians rather than deaf people, but at the core of an idea like this, there’s a sense of playfulness and astonishment. This inspired me to make smaller, cubical wind instruments that create vibrations by trapping air pressure. They are accessible for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, as you can ‘listen’ to them in different ways, and people of all abilities can play them. We also made copper flutes and real organ pipes together with another instrument maker and connected them all to a computer and a ventilator through a network of tubes. An apt metaphor for the work is a living body with a brain, lungs, organs and a heart, each assuming its own role but always in relation to each other.

AZ Funnily enough, I was also approached to make some work in a church recently. I had a similar idea about working with an organ. Coming across your work has made me feel as if something strange is happening, in a kind of metaphysical way, making us question what churches are, and their role in society today. How do we access some sense of transcendence? For me, rapture has always been associated with music. There is the famous example of Kandinsky, who became a painter after having visions, like synaesthesia, while hearing a classical orchestra perform. If you look at his paintings, they resemble musical scores. It makes me think that a sound could also allow a blind person to see, because so much of what we experience in sound is in our imagination, in our consciousness. I find this mixing of senses – of the visual and aural – very interesting.

TA It comes from putting myself in unfamiliar situations and relying on skills that I have learnt from music: improvisation, embracing some kind of naivety. When you are playing, you can make mistakes – it’s part of the game. So, working with deaf people, working with blind people, working in different cultures, and approaching things in a sincere way, with the goal of sharing a moment or trying something out together is great. First of all, we have fun, and from there it gets deeper. We each learn something. In my case, this kind of improvisational approach applies not just to human beings but also to how I play with materials, instruments and digital systems.

AZ I think that’s really special. When I experienced your recent performance for the Living Rehearsing… programme at YDP in London, I could sense the performers’ vulnerability in working through something in a very visible way. It was more like an open studio than a finished thing, and therefore felt like more of a dialogue. That opens up all these possibilities, not just with the performer and the work, but also with each other. It takes me back to something that Sartre once wrote: when everyone is waiting for the bus, there is a kind of common mission. But once we board the bus,we all have individual journeys, getting off at different times. For him, that initial queue was an image of what he called seriality: people brought together by a shared objective – catching the bus – while remaining essentially alone. I think working with sound is a similar thing, because you create a sonic field that everyone experiences together, while all responding to it very individually.

TA There is a different expectation of virtuosity between art and music spaces: while you might expect to find a virtuoso musician in a concert hall, you might not expect that in a gallery, where people are presenting a different, more conceptual skill. With experience and hindsight, I believe each environment offers its own set of restrictions and advantages, but what is most important is that we keep the sense of experimentation, of making everybody aware – the audience, the musicians, all those involved – that we are going to experience something exceptional, something unique and particular; that we are going to try something that may work or may not. This is the waiting for the bus you speak about: we are all in a position of waiting for something to happen that might not happen. The bus might not arrive. I don’t know what is coming, what is going, who is playing and who is not, so it already feels different from the usual experience of listening to a concert, watching a film, or engaging with something pre-composed or written. But it’s about being transparent with the situation; it’s announcing the rules of the game and making people feel immediately that they are part of it. And then things unfold. This is something the art world taught me, but now I think it applies to everything, the idea of being hospitable, being open.

AZ How does that apply to your upcoming Hyundai Commission in the Turbine Hall?

TA The Turbine Hall work will also be made from moments of performance, from moments of improvisation with others, where different elements start to come together. I’m exploring how a musician can intervene in an ecosystem like mine with similar instruments, and asking: what type of improvisation can unfold?

AZ How is the preparation going? What does your studio look like right now?

TA I assure you, from one colleague to another, that even today I still don’t know exactly what the work will look like! I’m figuring it out while I’m doing it. Because the space at Tate Modern is so big, I have set up a small five per cent of the final show in my studio in Paris. Every week friends come to improvise, people come to sit inside and we have drinks, we speak. I try to work as if the studio is the Turbine Hall space, hosting people and having things happen in it. I’m learning how the work can come together and scale up – what it’s really all about. That’s how I’m finding answers at the moment: through human encounters and creating the moments for meaning to manifest itself.

^{Hyundai Commission: Tarek Atoui, 13 October 2026 – 11 April 2027}

^{Tarek Atoui is an artist and electroacoustic composer whose practice explores sound through dynamic installations, experimental acoustic environments and collaborative performances. He lives and works in Paris.}

^{Abbas Zahedi is an artist working at the intersections of sonic and sculptural forms, exploring systems of care, thresholds of experience and the social architectures of our time. He is also an Associate Lecturer at the Royal College of Art, London.}

^{Hyundai Commission: Tarek Atoui is in partnership with Hyundai Motor. Supported by the Tarek Atoui Supporters Circle and Tate Americas Foundation. With further support from Mamou Mani and FabPub for the production and fabrication of the 3D printed components.}