Look up when you enter the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and “you won’t be able to stop looking up – because it’s raining musical instruments”, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian.
If Tarek Atoui had “just left it at that, it would still be an impressive, intriguing installation”, but the Lebanese artist takes things a step further. His “sculptural creations” are set alongside an “ever-changing” soundscape including an “earth-shaking bass note” that “throbs from a hanging trumpet”. Together, “it’s entrancing”: the installation is an “interconnected musical machine”.
After last year’s “debacle” that saw Máret Ánne Sara hang 72 reindeer hides in the Turbine Hall, the Tate has pulled things back with Atoui’s “beguiling, poetic installation”, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. Various musical instruments appear to “float in mid-air” and from a distance “softly illuminated drum skins resemble glowing planets or moons”.
Below this “cosmic ensemble” visitors can “linger on rough-hewn, bed-like stones with a pleasingly sculptural quality”. A collection of large bowls are peppered throughout the space, “as if to catch the notes and vibrations falling like rainwater from the instruments above”.
Behind an “imposing plinth” technicians control the “swelling, ‘sonic landscape’” using mixing desks “bristling with multicoloured wires”. In this way, Atoui’s installation is “both high and low-tech”, bringing together modern technology and “something much older and more analogue, soulful and warm”.
I thought it was a flop, said Laura Freeman in The Times. Atoui has produced a work that is “visually fiddly and portentously orchestrated”. Instruments are hung alongside “various unappealing vents” and the music is mostly “muted: a generalised, Goop-y wellness-retreat backing track”. Overall it’s a “thin, mannered, cluttered commission and a waste of a magnificent space”.
Atoui’s installation is “certainly no spectacle” and lacks an “immediate wow factor”, said Jo Lawson-Tancred on artnet. His assortment of hanging instruments and wires “looks a bit like a cross between a boiler room and a mid-tier design store”. But the artist has managed to “fill the venue and redefine it”, conjuring a sculpture out of sound and asking visitors to “gather, mingle and improvise” their own sounds in response. His installation may prove “surprisingly memorable”.
This is an artist who has “grabbed the opportunity to work in this vast space with both hands”, said Jones in The Guardian. His work is “rich, ingenious, funny, sad, mystical” – it’s an installation to “lose yourself in for hours”.
Tate Modern, London, from 13 October until 11 April 2027