Tarek Atoui’s ‘Hold’ Turns Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall Into an Instrument, and Critics Split

The first thing visitors coming down the ramp into Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall now see is a trio of horns. They announce Hold, Tarek Atoui’s Hyundai Commission, which opened Tuesday (Oct. 13) and runs through April 11, 2027. The Art Newspaper calls it the most sound-focused work in the hall since Bruce Nauman’s Raw Materials in 2004.

Atoui, a Lebanese artist and composer who lives in Paris, has filled the space with instruments. Artnet counts Korean drums, Uzbek horns, gongs and shengs hung beside amber lights, stone slabs on the floor to sit on and DJ equipment on a long, altar-like table at the back. One horn is a karnai he used at last year’s Bukhara Biennial. The other two were 3D-printed with Arthur Mamou-Mani’s architecture office from sugar and bamboo dust, a nod to Tate’s sugar-baron founder.

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The Japanese fashion house Issey Miyake worked with him on the textiles. A stretchy washi-and-cotton fabric, painted with charcoal paint, falls from the ceiling and conducts low-voltage electricity that drives bass synthesizers. Percussion modules Atoui calls Sunflowers listen through microphones and feed what they hear, including visitors’ voices, into looping and effects software.

I see the Turbine Hall as a vessel somehow; as a sound vessel or as a space that is meant to take us somewhere else.

Tarek Atoui, The Art Newspaper

The hall is also a stage. Atoui sees the piece as the culmination of two decades of musical collaborations, and Tate says he has invited musicians from across genres to compose, improvise and play within it. The first two sessions feature Emptyset, Mazen Kerbaj, Kenichi Iwasa and Aya Metwalli. “It’s not an easy space to tame,” Atoui said, explaining that he picked performers he believes will be sensitive to its quirks.

Reviews split. The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones wrote that “you won’t be able to stop looking up – because it’s raining musical instruments,” according to The Week, and The Telegraph’s Alastair Sooke called it a “beguiling, poetic installation.” The Times’ Laura Freeman thought it a flop, a “thin, mannered, cluttered commission and a waste of a magnificent space.” Artnet’s Jo Lawson-Tancred found it “certainly no spectacle,” looking “a bit like a cross between a boiler room and a mid-tier design store,” yet thought it might prove “surprisingly memorable.”

The commission landed in the middle of Frieze Week, when London’s fairs drew collectors and Tate Britain’s The 90s was splitting critics of its own. Atoui says the politics of sound work quietly, through “the part of the intimate and the personal that leads to the collective.” Hold is free and open daily.