Tarek Atoui's Turbine Hall: The Commission You Listen To

Every October, the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern gets a new occupant and the art world gets a new argument. Some years the argument is about spectacle, as with Olafur Eliasson’s indoor sun or Kara Walker’s colossal fountain. Some years it is about whether the space can be filled at all. This year, with Tarek Atoui’s Hold, which opens to the public today, the question is different, and more interesting: what happens when the most famous room in British contemporary art is treated not as a gallery but as an instrument?

What you will find

The Lebanese artist and composer, who lives in Paris, has filled the hall with a hanging orchestra. Coming down the ramp from the west entrance, the first thing you meet is a karnai, a long ceremonial brass trumpet from Uzbekistan, suspended alongside two 3D-printed horns that echo its shape. Atoui describes them as “announcing what is to come”. At the far end, drum skins, gongs, stones and 20-metre lengths of textile hang from a lattice of bamboo and shengs, the mouth organs of China and Southeast Asia. A computer-controlled motor pushes air through the whole arrangement, so the building’s own draughts become part of the music.

On the floor, large rough-hewn rocks and shallow basins act as seating. Warm amber lights hang low. Visitors are encouraged to sit, lie down and look up, and microphones dotted through the installation sample whatever they hear (instruments, footsteps, a child shouting to a parent) and feed it into software Atoui has written himself. That material is looped, processed and played back, so the soundscape is never the same twice.

The materials carry stories of their own. The printed horns are made from a mix of sugar and bamboo dust, developed with the London studio of architect Arthur Mamou-Mani. Atoui points out that sugar is a quiet nod to Henry Tate, the sugar refiner whose fortune founded the gallery. The long textiles, made with Issey Miyake from a blend of Japanese washi paper and cotton, are painted with charcoal and carry a low electrical current, which Atoui uses to generate bass tones. As they sway in the hall’s air currents, they behave, in his words, like “big sails”.

Not a spectacle, and that is the point

First impressions may divide people. Jo Lawson-Tancred, reviewing for Artnet, admitted to “an initial wave of disappointment” on entering, likening the muted grey, beige and orange assemblage to “a cross between a boiler room and a mid-tier design store”. Yet she came round, concluding that the work offers “a new way of experiencing the cavernous, post-industrial space”. Ben Luke of The Art Newspaper places it as the most sound-focused Turbine Hall work since Bruce Nauman’s Raw Materials in 2004, which filled the space with recorded voices.

This matters because the commission has had a bumpy few years. Last year’s installation, a tribute to Sámi ancestral knowledge, drew heavy criticism, and the hall has a long record of what critics call failed showstoppers: works that try to out-shout a room built for power generators and lose. Atoui seems to have sidestepped the contest. He told The Art Newspaper that he sees the hall less as a cathedral than as “a silo” or “a sound vessel”: a space meant to carry you somewhere else, rather than to awe you on arrival.

A work that grows over six months

The most important thing to know about Hold is that it is unfinished by design. Across its six-month run, the Turbine Hall will host live sessions in which musicians “plug into” the installation and play it as a sound system. The opening sessions this week feature the Lebanese trumpeter Mazen Kerbaj, Japanese musician Kenichi Iwasa and Egyptian vocalist Aya Metwalli, with workshops to follow. Atoui says the right performers will be able to “play the whole space like an instrument”. It is, he admits, “not an easy space to tame”.

That makes this a commission that rewards a second or third visit. A quiet weekday morning and a live session should feel like two different works. Atoui is clear that the political dimension of his work lives in this kind of gathering, where sound allows “the intimate and the personal” to lead “to the collective”.

Why it is worth your time

For gallery-goers who find large-scale installations either overwhelming or underwhelming, Hold offers a gentler entry point. You do not need to know anything about experimental music or sound art. You need only to stay long enough to notice how the room changes around you. It also marks the start of a new decade for the Hyundai Commission, after the carmaker extended its partnership with Tate to 2036. More than 21 million people have visited the commissions since 2015, and few rooms in the country shape public taste for contemporary art quite so directly.

If you have spent this Frieze season moving briskly from booth to booth, an hour lying on a warm stone beneath a breathing bamboo canopy may be the best antidote London has to offer.

Hyundai Commission: Tarek Atoui: Hold is at Tate Modern, Bankside, from 13 October 2026 to 11 April 2027. Admission is free. Open daily 10:00 to 18:00, until 21:00 on Fridays and Saturdays.