ART-PRESENTATION: Tarek Atoui-The Ground From the Land to the Sea
Tarek Atoui is a musician, composer and sound artist working experimentally with custom-built electronic instruments. He initiates and curates multidisciplinary interventions, concerts, performances and workshops worldwide. These projects are based on extensive research into the history of music and instrumentation, while also exploring new methods of production.
ByDimitris Lempesis
Photo: NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore Archive
Tarek Atoui often articulates social realities and histories in his work, while presenting music as a powerful mode of expression and identity. His current works are process-based, collaborative projects and include composing sound works, making new types of musical instruments, and large-scale collaborative performances. The first solo exhibition in Southeast Asia by Tarek Atoui, “The Ground: From the Land to the Sea”, is conceived as a musical composition that unfolds in space through its unique sound library and instruments. It is the first piece Atoui has created through associations between objects, instruments, and recordings, some borrowed from pre-existing projects, others newly collected and produced. The sounds are from underwater environments, as well as human and industrial activities in the harbours of Athens and Abu Dhabi, recorded for the ongoing project “I/E”. As part of the exhibition, Atoui will record, together with sound artist Eric La Casa, the harbour of Singapore to add to this collection. Most of the instruments are part of “The Ground project”, the result of Atoui’s five-year-long observation of nature and agricultural processes in the Pearl River Delta, first presented at Mirrored Gardens in Guangzhou, China. The instruments are acoustic and electronic in nature and were made in collaboration with innovative luthiers, craftsmen, and electronic engineers. In Singapore, this ensemble is enriched with new additions, such as a set of porcelain discs on which traditional Arab rhythms are engraved, and a record player that rotates at irregular speeds, never reading a disc the same way twice. The visitor therefore, witness an ever-changing sonic and visual scenery born out of the dialogue between an orchestra of unusual instruments and sounds recorded from harbours. At the core of Atoui’s practice lies an ongoing process of inviting composers, musicians, and artists to collaborate on his pieces in search of new ideas, gestures, and experiences. For his presentation in Singapore, Atoui engages with local and international musicians who were invited to appropriate his composition and intervene in the exhibition space. He works with: Vivian Wang and Yuen Chee Wai, as well as music curator Mark Wong, who in turn will invite other musicians and sound artists to inhabit the installation throughout the course of the exhibition.
Info: Curators: Ute Meta Bauer and Khim Ong, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, Gillman Barracks, 43 Malan Road, Singapore, Duration: 24/3-24/6/18, Days & Hours: Tue & Fri-Sun 12:00-19:00, Fri 12:00-21:00, http://ntu.ccasingapore.org
