PRESENTATION: Tarek Atoui-Souffle Continu & Sunflowers

Tarek Atoui is a Lebanese sound artist and composer based in Paris known for his innovative approach to sound, performance, and instrument-making. His work explores the physicality of sound and the act of listening, creating immersive experiences that challenge traditional boundaries between artist, audience, and instrument. Atoui frequently collaborates with musicians, instrument makers, and people with diverse hearing abilities, emphasising inclusivity and experimentation.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: IMMA Archive

Tarek Atoui has, over the past two decades, profoundly reshaped how sound is conceived, produced, and experienced within contemporary art. Based in Paris and working internationally, Atoui foregrounds listening as an embodied, social, and political act. His work consistently challenges the dominance of auditory norms, questioning who sound is for, how it is accessed, and how it might be felt beyond the ear.

Atoui’s practice unfolds at the intersection of sound art, experimental music, sculpture, and performance. Central to his work is an expanded understanding of musical instruments: not as fixed, virtuosic tools, but as open systems that invite collective activation, experimentation, and reinterpretation. His projects frequently emerge through long-term collaborations with musicians, instrument makers, educators, and people with diverse hearing abilities. Rather than presenting sound as a finished composition, Atoui creates conditions in which sound can be generated, transformed, and perceived in multiple ways.

The exhibition at IMMA brings together key bodies of work that explore breath, vibration, rhythm, and material resonance. Unfolding across the Baroque

Chapel and Gallery 3, Atoui constructs immersive environments that invite visitors to engage with sound physically, spatially, and socially. These works do not demand our singular attention, rather they encourage listening, drifting, lingering, entering, and sensing. Conceptually, the exhibition proposes listening as a form of knowledge; rooted in the body and shaped by context, material, and movement.

“Souffle Continu”, presented in the Baroque Chapel, takes its title from the ‘continuous breath’ or circular breathing technique used by wind musicians to sustain a note without pausing for air. Here, it alludes to an installation that explores sound generated through air and movement. Through a system of

air circulation, the works create low frequencies and physical sensations that can be felt as much as heard. Atoui describes this body of work as “a set of possibilities and a potential sound generator,” capable of producing multiple interpretations, collective situations, and musical outcomes.

The installation consists of multiple instruments: “Wind House #1” and “Wind House #2” are immersive sound chambers that visitors are invited to enter. Modelled on the SubBass Prototone, “Wind House #1” replicates the monumental scale of the experimental organ pipe created in the 1980s by Johannes Goebel. “Wind House #2” features a more elongated structure, producing a distinct spatial resonance. In both works, sound is generated through a sliding pane controlling the flow of air from a compressor. As sound waves vibrate through the walls and floor of each chamber, they are transmitted through the visitor’s body, transforming the listener into an integral part of the instrument itself.

At the centre of the installation is “Organ Within”, developed in collaboration with Léo Maurel and Vincent Martial. Drawing on research into church pipe organs, modular synthesizers, and the perception of tone by deaf listeners, air is channelled through pipes laid across the ground like tentacles, producing amplified vibrations and deep frequencies that resonate in the body. Organ Within is presented together with Reedboxes, small instruments shaped like wooden boxes assembled using materials with different acoustic properties that produce melodies.

Atoui began researching these ideas in 2013 through conversations with deaf students, leading to the development of an earlier project titled WITHIN. Rather than prioritising traditional auditory perception, these works emphasise physical, visual, and gestural ways of experiencing sound. Each object is the result of close collaboration with musicians and artisans, with their playability tested and refined through workshops with educators and students. This process reflects Atoui’s commitment to learning through making and shared experimentation, allowing the works to evolve sonically and sensorially through demonstration.

The exhibition continues in Gallery 3, where Atoui presents “Sunflowers”, a body of work inspired by the rhythmic and material traditions of Korean drumming. These works mark a shift toward percussion and resonance, while maintaining Atoui’s ongoing interest in listening as a relational and collective act.

“Sunflowers” occupies multiple rooms and functions both as sculptural objects and as listening devices, subtly recalibrating the acoustic environment of the gallery. Rather than isolating sound sources, the works reflect, absorb, and transform ambient noise, drawing attention to the existing rhythms of the space. The gallery itself is conceived as an immersive listening environment; continually shaped by movement, conversation, and activity.

“The Whisperers”, located in Room 2 of Gallery 3, is an installation that examines sound as a material phenomenon shaped by its passage through matter. Composed of listening devices made from plastic, wood, brass, water, bronze, glass, and stone, the work foregrounds how different materials alter vibration, resonance, and transmission. The installation was initially developed through a series of workshops conducted by Atoui with pupils from an infant class at the École Alsacienne in Paris between November 2020 and June 2021.

Functioning as an open system for improvisation and experimentation, “The Whisperers” invites listening as an active practice. The soundscape is not a fixed composition, but one continuously activated through interaction, movement, and material response. By amplifying subtle vibrations and everyday sonic occurrences, the work encourages a reconsideration of ordinary objects as acoustic agents, revealing how sound behaves, transforms, and accumulates as it travels through different materials and states.

“Whispering Playground” is a circuit channeling sound and vibration from multiple sources, including industrial noise, flowing water, percussion, and vinyl recordings. This space invites exploration and play, encouraging visitors to experience familiar, everyday objects as active sonic materials.

Photo: Tarek Atoui, Souffle Continu & Sunflowers, Exhibition View, IMMA — Irish Museum of Modern Art-Dublin, 2026, Courtesy the artist and IMMA — Irish Museum of Modern Art

Info: Curator: Mary Cremin, IMMA — Irish Museum of Modern Art, Kilmainham, Royal Hospital, Military Road, Dublin, Ireland, Duration: 21/2-19/7/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-17:30, Sun 12:00-17:30, https://imma.ie/