Whether it’s quasi-sculptures of drum skins and kit stands or a floor-filling, deconstructed organ, the artist’s electroacoustic contrivances are absurdly moving
The centrepiece of Souffle Continu – Tarek Atoui’s sculptural ensemble of unorthodox, outsize musical instruments, transforming IMMA’s Baroque chapel into an experimental performance space – is a sprawling, deconstructed organ. Composed of electrical air blowers, variously configured ‘flutes’ (small timber crates fitted with brass reeds or adjustable vents) and long, loose, serpentine tubes, the Paris-based Lebanese artist’s elaborate, floor-covering Organ Within (2022) radiates Rube Goldberg-style mechanical absurdity. But as a musical organ, it looks biologically organic too: like the invertebrate, tentacular splay of a giant squid or the spilled innards of a slaughtered beast. When played (as a 15-minute computer-sequenced cycle, or in performances by Atoui and invited musicians), the instrument gasps and groans. Sighing, wailing, hyperventilating: its voicings are both animalistic and machinic, a wheezing body or chugging engine, coming to life or shutting down.
Two adjacent objects appear, at a glance, more recognisably practical. These two-metre-tall glass-panelled cabinets resemble rudimentary museum vitrines, but they function within Atoui’s network of organ gadgetry as ‘wind houses’: display cases to step into, instruments to play and experience from within. Hooked up to pipes and pumps, the chambers become wardrobe-size flutes, specialist performers or gallery visitors opening and closing panels or operating pulleys to control airflow, causing tremulous modulations in the droning, amorphous music. When experienced while standing inside these Wind Houses (#1 & #2) (2024), the strange sonics are physically affecting, the cabinets behaving like sensory activation tanks: sending pulses and murmurs throughout the body, into the bones, stimulating awareness of sound’s penetrating, extra-aural reach.
This multisensory scope is vital to Atoui’s inclusive, expansive sound-sculpting. Following a revelatory 2012 workshop series with students at Al Amal School for the Deaf in Sharjah (as part of Below 160, an electronic music project focused on deep bass frequencies), Atoui began to further explore nonauditory sonic phenomena, inventing instruments calibrated to the myriad subtleties of low-end vibration or percussive tactility. Ever since, he has continued to dive deeper into the felt complexity of musical effects, whether experienced as listener or performer.
At IMMA, a second, smaller-scale array of lively electroacoustic contrivances, staged in the four compact rooms of the museum’s ground floor under the collective title Sunflowers, represents further facets of Atoui’s boffinish delight in merging sound with substance. These intricately kinetic, differently resonating installations (comprising works made from 2021 to 2025) bear comparison with band setups for studio sessions: relaxed arrangements of snaking cables, drum skins, kit stands, cymbals, speaker boxes. In each case, Atoui adds combinations of associated, or largely unrelated, equipment – record players and analogue tape loops, suspended metal sheets, containers of water, a medical stethoscope – layering textural sounds and aligning diversely sensitive materials in novel, active configurations, orchestrating a polyphony of harmonic shimmers and rhythmic throbs that play, in part, on programmed loops, but also adapt to minute-by-minute ambient shifts. Microphones capture and amplify movements between objects and throughout the spaces, however quiet. (One body of works, notably, is subtitled The Whisperers, 2021–22.) The passing drift of visitors, the shivering of suspended cymbals, the ping of water droplets into a steel bucket (a tiny action that here reverberates like a Space Echo snare-hit on a deep dub recording): all contribute to understated swells and lowkey eddies of sound. No doubt the eclectic instruments come more energetically alive when used in workshops or performances (a possibility flagged in accompanying notes), but even in autoplay mode, they make an impression on the listening body. Sitting or standing, still or moving, we experience a symphony of intimate tremors.
Souffle Continu and Sunflowers are on view at Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, through 19 July
From the April & May 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
