For his Hyundai Commission, Tarek Atoui has transformed the Turbine Hall into a vast sonic landscape, bringing together custom-built bamboo wind instruments, brass, percussion, stone, 3D-printed sculptural forms and electronic systems. Connecting earth and sky, the work comes to life in the act of performance as both a vast and intimate orchestra. Developed through longstanding collaborations with musicians, instrument makers, engineers and researchers across East Asia, West and Central Asia and Europe, the installation draws together ancient, transcultural instrument-making traditions and technological experimentation. These complementary forms of knowledge form a composition that continually shifts and adapts over the course of the Commission.
Bamboo
Image: Alexandre Guirkinger
Bamboo is a material associated with wind instruments across many cultures. Atoui sees bamboo as a symbol of cultural circulation.
Suspended throughout the Turbine Hall is a network of bamboo pipes, featuring shengs, an ancient family of instruments found across East and Southeast Asia. Working with musicians, instrument makers and local communities in China, Japan, Korea, Thailand and Laos, Atoui explores the instrument's diverse histories, materials and playing techniques. At the same time, he develops innovative contemporary versions of them:
I have been preparing this constellation of mouth organs and shengs collected from different parts of Southeast Asia where this instrument was born. Each culture appropriated it [the sheng] in a different way. I’ve looked at museum collections in China and asked instrument-makers there to reproduce shengs that are seven, eight hundred years old. I’ve then connected all these instruments – there are roughly seventy-five of them – to this bamboo network in which they are activated by motor blowers and wind flows, then tuned to sing with each other as one big organ. They can create harmonious melodic sounds with long sustained chords, but they can also create microtonal music. And they are a fundamental sonic and visual element of the work.
Tarek Atoui
Stone
Image: Charles Gohy
Formed over millions of years, stones bear traces of geological transformation, flowing water and human intervention. Atoui engages with stones not as static objects but as living archives. Carving them and channelling sound through them to amplify their natural acoustic properties, he reveals sounds that are ordinarily imperceptible to us. The stones are structures for people to sit or lie down on, and many of them house speakers so that sound can be felt through them.
In the quarry in Carrara, I noticed these rock beds left when you cut away stone blocks or marble blocks. These beds of rocks, two by three metres or one by two metres, were for me at least as interesting as the blocks themselves, because they felt to me like lithophones [musical instruments made from rocks struck to produce musical notes]. Not only can we lie or sit on these, but we can also play on them. And the sound they make – sharp, distinct, almost piercing – is a nice way to dialogue with the sounds that are coming from above, which are bassy, droney, continuous... I liked thinking of these stones in the space not just as lithophones, but as blocks we could use to help us build something.
An element that became very important for me was a kind of banquet table, where a substantial number of people can gather. During exhibition hours, people can come with a computer or with a lunch and sit on the stones, and musicians can also come and plug their equipment into the system and play.
Tarek Atoui
Skin
Image: Alexandre Guirkinger
Image: Alexandre Guirkinger
Drums made with extra-large leather skins in collaboration with expert drum maker In Seok Seo, are central to the installation's ever-changing composition. Exploring ancient techniques of stretching drumskin, Atoui uses heating lamps to create tension, which changes the drums' pitch. The drums are also struck with mallets made of unconventional materials and powered by windshield motors. Their sounds are captured by microphones and transformed by Atoui's custom generative software, which continuously samples, processes and redistributes them throughout the Turbine Hall.
I started from the Korean drum tradition, working with a drum maker named In Seok Seo to deconstruct the whole vocabulary of the instrument – the ropes, the skins, the materials – rebuilding it in such a way that we could play our drums using heat, vibration, water and wind. Leather-made drums are very sensitive to environmental effects – they soak water like sponges, they contract and expand with climate fluctuations.
Tarek Atoui
Brass
Image: Alexandre Guirkinger
The long metal karnai horns featured in the installation belong to a musical tradition that stretches across Central Asia, the Caucasus and parts of West Asia. Historically played during public celebrations, ceremonies and processions, the instruments are known for their extraordinary length and powerful, far-reaching sound. Rather than being used to perform melodies, the karnai announces presence, marking moments of gathering and creating connections across large distances.
For the Hyundai Commission, Atoui reimagines the karnai as both sculptural forms and acoustic devices. Suspended within the Turbine Hall, they channel, project and transform sound produced elsewhere in the installation, extending conversations between drums, bamboo mouth organs, stone resonators and visitors.
The horns originated in works I had made for the Bukhara Biennial in Uzbekistan in 2025, where I presented a performance using a series of horns in exaggerated, elongated, shapes inspired by karnai horns. I’d always thought these instruments would fit nicely with the shengs, with the percussion and with these bass textiles. I wanted to bring them to the Turbine Hall with their brass, handmade quality.
Tarek Atoui
Sunflowers
Atoui has created sculptures he calls ‘sunflowers’, dispersed through the installation. These are suspended structures comprised of drums, ceramics and microphones that pick up sounds in the space and translate and distort them into an electro-acoustic composition that plays back into the space.
There’s a lot of sampling in this piece, and one of the instruments that plays with sampling is the Sunflowers. These are modules composed of different percussive elements and materials from previous collaborations and different parts of the world – clay, drumskins, bronze elements, gongs. Microphones are mounted onto these elements. They ‘listen’ to the space and capture their surroundings, and they’re connected to a computer program I spent a lot of time writing and developing. The way the microphones are placed, and the software I made allow the sunflowers to function like the pedals of a guitar player, or the modules of a synthesizer that an electronic musician assembles. Each sunflower processes sound in a different way. Some create loops and reverberation, others distort the sound, while others perform spectral convolution and more complex forms of processing. Together, they enrich the sonic palette of the composition, creating support and counterpoints to the sounds of the acoustic instruments.
Tarek Atoui
Sugar
Image: Alexandre Guirkinger
Image: Alexandre Guirkinger
Atoui often thinks about the lives of materials and how they can be liberated from certain histories and used in new ways. Part of the installation are 3D-printed horns developed in collaboration with UK-based architecture firm Arthur Mamou-Mani. They are made from a composite of sugar resin and bamboo dust. Rather than treating fabrication waste as a by-product, the project transforms it into a new acoustic material, giving it a second life. The resulting forms both echo and adapt the shape of the karnai horns, also present in the space.
Sugar also holds a connection to Tate’s history of being founded by sugar merchant, Henry Tate, and accompanying critiques of colonialism and empire.
This goes back to a collaboration I had a few years ago with Arthur Mamou-Mani, when I was fascinated by techniques of 3D printing with organic materials. My first fascination was with Arthur’s use of sugar resin to make largescale 3D-printed architectural elements and surfaces.
The more I thought about it, the more meaningful it became that the Turbine Hall was once again hosting and sheltering materials and objects arriving from across the world, while the only element produced locally was this special material developed by Arthur and his team, based on the resynthesis and recycling of materials. This is where the idea of integrating the horns appeared for me.
At Mamou-Mani Architects and Fab.Pub, we think of materials not as fixed products but as moments within a longer life cycle. For Tarek Atoui’s commission, we have been working with a PLA-based biopolymer derived from plant sugars and blended with bamboo dust, bringing together two plant-based sources through large-scale additive manufacturing. The process allows us to place material only where it is needed and to make complex forms without conventional moulds or formwork.
The project has also made us question what ‘“bio-based’” really means: a renewable origin alone does not make a material circular. We increasingly look at the whole journey – where the feedstock comes from and how it is processed, to fabrication, use, disassembly and what can happen to the material afterwards. Working with Tarek has reinforced our interest in designing not only the form of an object, but the material journey behind it, and in making those cycles increasingly local, traceable and regenerative.
Mamou-Mani
Wind
Wind shapes much of the work. It passes through the bamboo at different strengths, controlled by motorised wind blowers, which play the shengs in chorus. The horns − both brass and 3D printed versions − punctuate the soundscape at different moments, with wind becoming a grounding force. The textiles also oscillate in response to wind currents, generating different sound frequencies throughout the space. As the seasons change, the climate conditions in the Turbine Hall also shift, animating the installation in new ways.
Textile
Image: Alexandre Guirkinger
One family of instruments that have been newly developed for the Turbine Hall are long textiles that descend from the ceiling to the ground, connecting earth and sky. These textiles feature a black strip of conductive ink that makes them function as ‘oscillators’, generating low bass sound frequencies. They are composed of washi (paper fibres), nylon, cotton and polyurethane.
These textiles I have developed are made with Satoshi Kondo and Issey Miyake, with whom I have had collaborations in the past. They’re inspired by the idea of grain falling into a silo. They also have a trail of black ink that runs along them and transmits a very low-voltage electrical current. That current is then transferred to a small synthesiser we built, and transformed into bass frequencies and vibrations in the space. So, this long, thirty-metre textile is a low frequency oscillator, not just in the electronic sense of the word but also because the textile itself oscillates due to wind currents traversing the hall and is affected by the humidity levels and temperature of the space.
Tarek Atoui
