Review of Tarek Atoui's Turbine Hall – Hallelujah, Musical Instruments Are Raining Down!

Tate Modern, London: This Lebanese artist has turned trumpets, drums, cones and sounds into an inventive, interconnected sound monster with funny, sad and mystical results. Get ready to feel the earth move! On the floor of the Turbine Hall are vast pools of water and large, flat carved rocks that you might see in a plain or desert. You can sit, stand or climb on them. But if you look up, the dampness...

On the floor of Turbine Hall, there are vast pools of water and large, flat, jagged rocks that you might see in a plain or desert. You can sit or stand or climb on them. But if you look up, you can't stop looking—because it's raining musical instruments. Elongated brass trumpets and giant glowing drums seem to float in the air and hang from the ceiling beams of the former power plant.

If Lebanese artist Tarek Atoui had dropped it right now, the installation would have been impressive and fascinating, but this is Tate Modern, baby, and Atoui has not been asked to occupy its largest space with mere physical objects. Instead, his sculptural creations and found objects resonate with art's ever-shifting and invisible sounds. An earth-shaking bass note hangs from a trumpet—or is it from that translucent cone that rises from the ground like an ethereal spire? Then the sound of the drum is heard in the space and the romantic and painful voice of the woman sings notes of endless nostalgia and melancholy.

It's catchy, the music has captured you. To me it is music, however abstract, non-melodic, the rising and falling of sounds that lead you around and through the installation's forest of solid things. But then - isn't music ever sculpture? Listening to Stravinsky's Sickle Percussion certainly is. And the desire to crystallize sound waves into something visible has involved everyone from opera inventors to opera designers. Psychedelic light shows.

However, Tarek Atui still manages to do something new and beautiful with sound and vision. He teases you and boggles your mind about how his musical instruments relate to the sounds you hear, how rocks and pools of water, pipes and wires have created this flood of sound. The whole installation is a connected music device.

It's funny too, there's a warm, generous humor to it all. In the past, a crazy mechanical contraption like this was called a "Robinsonish Heath" after the early 20th century British cartoonist who came up with such a thing. A better comparison is Leonardo da Vinci, who invented wild musical instruments among his other real and impossible machines: water-powered organs, a stringed instrument in the shape of a fantastic beast.

Like Leonardo, Atoui seems to be searching for the lost harmony in the world, the hidden note that pleased God. Sadness ripples through the sounds that fill this vast gray space, as the bass notes pound harder and build into an apocalyptic explosion. What is mourning and where does it take us? You feel like you are in a city full of sounds and sights. The multitude of towering and floating peaks, the mysterious sound and the climax of the percussion show the ancient and ups and downs labyrinth of a city. I thought of Lahore and Morocco, a street singer once heard in an Istanbul bazaar. However, this city is purer, less tangible. Its towers fly in the air.

Ultimately, you can't reduce this magical and elusive work of art to a fixed meaning. You have to surrender to it, the sound gathers you in its trance like a mystical spiral dance. There is a lot of similarity with drummers and Sufi dervishes who use music and movement to induce a liberating and trance-like relaxation. I certainly didn't want to leave. The vibrations and the complex visual composition keep your brain busy, but you are also calm and relaxed.

Also showing the urban life around the site, the strange sounds of Bankside: Music of the City, assembled into Atui's random sound collage. But when you are shown a world beyond the physical world, reality slips and fades away. All of these objects, from cones to rocks to the electric guitar played live in the press preview, are nothing but air. They captivate the eye, but the sound ultimately shatters the material world. The solid things Atui starts with become as unreal as a reflection in a backyard pond.

Atui has seized the opportunity to work with both hands in this vast space and create something rich, inventive, funny, sad, mystical. It is a turbine hall where you can lose yourself for hours, dreaming and wondering. This is the vocal response to the sun indoors - and Atui is a modern magus.

Tarek Atoui's Turbine Hall installation runs from October 13 to April 11, 2027 at Tate Modern, London.