ART CITIES:N.York-Tarek Atoui
Tarek Atoui is an artist and electroacoustic composer working with sound performance. The artist engineers complex and inventive instruments as well as arranges and curates interventions, concerts, performances, and workshops. His practice develops from extensive research into music history and instrumentation, revolving around large-scale, collaborative performances that explore new methods of production.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: kurimanzutto Archive
Tarek Atoui’s work is centrally concerned with the ongoing reflection on the instrument and the act of performing as a multifaceted, open, and dynamic process. The orchestrated performances are mostly improvised, but are always grounded in a meticulous investigation of sound archives and collections. Concerned with education and social connection, Atoui’s projects explore sustained methodologies in which deaf people can experience and perceive sound. Using custom-built electronic instruments and computers, Atoui references current social and political realities, revealing music and new technologies as powerful components of expression and identity. Tarek Atoui’s project “Organ Within” is on presentation at kurimanzutto’s cabinet space in New York City. Operating as an open sound laboratory and instrumentarium, Atoui debuts a new hybrid sculptural object that engages numerous technologies in order to re-envision the spatialization, perception and performativity of the traditional organ. “Organ Within” is the result of his ongoing collaboration with instrument-makers Léo Maurel and Vincent Martial, and their research into historical church pipe organs, modular synthesizers, and the sonic experiences of deaf people. For this presentation, Atoui partners with Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe from CONTROL, Brooklyn’s leading synthesizer shop. As host and activator of the project, CONTROL has invited a diverse group of sound artists and musicians from New York’s experimental music community to venture and play the organ. This group of collaborators occupies the cabinet space one week at a time, to work with the instrument for research and recording purposes. These residencies will be open to the public, with a weekly performance held every Saturday at 15:00. Out of this continuous improvisation, Atoui and CONTROL will curate a final performance in the Rotunda of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on 26/6/19 at 19:00. To mark the closing of the two month project all resident artists will gather together to perform a simultaneous session. A moderated conversation with Atoui and his collaborators will precede the performance.
Info: kurimanzutto, 22 East 65 Street, 4th floor, New York, Duration: 2/5-25/6/19, every Sat at 15:00, www.kurimanzutto.com
