Tarek Atoui’s Sound-Based Installations Point to a New Museum Logic
Sound has become harder to ignore in contemporary art museums. Exhibitions now arrive with scores, sculptures emit noise, and performance increasingly shapes how visitors move through a gallery. Few artists embody that shift more clearly than Tarek Atoui, the Lebanese-born, Paris-based artist and composer whose work treats listening as both material and event.
Atoui’s practice often takes the form of environments rather than discrete objects. Within them, sculptures can operate as experimental musical instruments, activated by audiences or performers. The result is art that does not simply occupy space; it changes the terms of encounter, asking viewers to listen, move, and participate.
That approach places him squarely within a broader turn in museum culture, where sound is being used to transform exhibitions into sites of gathering. At the current Venice Biennale, Atoui is part of the Qatar Pavilion project “Untitled 2026 (A Gathering Of Remarkable People),” a collaboration with figures from art, music, and food. The work is designed to evolve over the course of the Biennale, extending the exhibition into something closer to a living environment than a fixed display.
Later this year, Atoui will take on the next Turbine Hall commission at Tate Modern in London, one of the most closely watched spaces in international contemporary art. The assignment is significant not only for its scale, but for what it suggests about the institution’s priorities: sound, performance, and collective experience are no longer peripheral to museum programming. They are increasingly central to it.
Atoui’s trajectory raises a larger question for the field. As museums continue to embrace hybrid forms that blur installation, performance, and composition, what kinds of public experience are they trying to create — and what does that mean for the future of exhibition making?
