Tarek Atoui Brings His Sonic Experiments to Tate Modern's Turbine Hall

Lebanese artist Tarek Atoui is taking over Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, and he wants visitors to listen — really listen — to the city around them.

Sitting outside the gallery, Atoui drums his fingers on a table, waving a cigarette at the world. On the riverside promenade, the sounds are everywhere: a busker playing out front of Tate Modern, the hum of pedestrians, the rumble of a plane over London, the wash of a boat under the bridge.

"You can identify a city by how it sounds," the artist told the Guardian, "as much as by how it looks. And not only that! You can play a city, just like he is playing the table, so that it sings."

Who is Tarek Atoui?

Atoui is a musician and an impresario as much as a visual artist. His method is consistent: he listens to the world around him, then coaxes a tune out of it. His materials range from underwater explosions to PlayStation joysticks, all of it filtered through an art practice rooted in sound.

His previous exhibitions have resembled recording studios caught mid-improvisation. Instruments appear to have been assembled from scavenged materials, as if built on the instructions of a dream.

What might the Turbine Hall commission look like?

Based on his past work, expect environments rather than objects. Atoui's installations have featured:

• A tentacular wind organ played live
• Wires snaking across the floor from a bleeping synthesiser
• A glass booth functioning like a walk-in flute, whistling around the visitor's body
• Marble boulders emitting woozy pulses
• Drums beating to shifting patterns
• Microphones picking up visitors' footsteps and feeding the sound back into the music

The result is a world in miniature, made of sound — and one in which the audience is never fully separate from the artwork.

Can sound art work in the Turbine Hall?

The question hangs over the commission. Tate Modern's vast hall is known for chattering day-trippers, overstimulated schoolchildren and notoriously echoing acoustics — conditions that would defeat most sound-based work.

Atoui's practice suggests a different reading: rather than fighting ambient noise, he treats it as raw material. The buskers, footsteps and urban drone of London's South Bank may become part of the piece itself. His installations already harvest visitors' movements through microphones and loop them into the score, so a crowded hall could function as an unexpectedly large ensemble.

Whether the commission can hold its own against one of the noisiest rooms in British art will only be answered when visitors walk in — and, if Atoui gets his way, start listening.