Tarek Atoui turns the Turbine Hall into a vast, dripping instrument

A power station learns to sing

Tarek Atoui’s new work for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall does the thing this space has always demanded and rarely managed: it makes you look up, then makes you stop looking altogether and simply listen. According to the Guardian’s review, the Lebanese artist has filled the hall’s floor with water basins and rough-hewn rocks for visitors to sit, stand or climb on, while overhead, elongated brass trumpets and giant drums hang from the old power station’s girders as if caught mid-fall from the sky.

The sound is the real commission. Bass notes throb from the suspended brass, translucent cones rise from the ground “like an ethereal minaret”, and a woman’s voice drifts through the hall with what the review calls “infinite nostalgia and melancholy”. It is, by the paper’s account, an interconnected sonic system rather than a static sculpture park - objects that resonate and echo in combination, shifting constantly rather than playing on loop.

The Turbine Hall’s recurring problem

What the review doesn’t dwell on, and what’s worth asking anyway, is the economics behind commissions of this scale. The Turbine Hall slot has been one of the most coveted - and most expensive - in British art since 2000, a space so vast that filling it convincingly requires serious engineering, serious fabrication budgets, and serious institutional backing. Tate has leaned on corporate sponsorship for the hall across its history, and funding models for that programme have shifted and strained over the past decade as sponsors have come and gone and public subsidy for national museums has been squeezed.

None of that appears in the Guardian’s review, which is a review, not an audit - but it’s the context any report on a Tate Modern spectacular should carry. A free, publicly accessible installation of trumpets and drums suspended on steel rigging, with water features built into the floor, doesn’t arrive cheaply, and the viewing public rarely gets told what it cost or who underwrote it. Atoui’s work being “ingenious” and “mystical”, in the review’s words, doesn’t make the question of who pays for ingenuity disappear.

Sound art’s uneasy place in a visual institution

There’s a broader point here too. Sound and audio-based practice has had an awkward relationship with major galleries for years - hard to photograph, hard to market on a poster, harder still to sell in the way a painting or sculpture can be sold. That Tate has given its single most prestigious annual slot to a work built almost entirely from noise, resonance and found instruments suggests either growing institutional confidence in sound as serious contemporary art, or simply that Atoui’s proposal was spectacular enough to clear whatever internal hurdles exist for non-visual commissions. The review doesn’t say which, and visitors won’t much care while standing under a floating trumpet that sounds, as described, like the earth moving.

The takeaway

Judged purely as described, this is a confident, atmospheric piece of Turbine Hall theatre - a hall built for noise finally given noise worthy of its scale. What’s unverified from the review alone is everything underneath it: the budget, the sponsor, the fabrication costs, and whether Atoui himself has been paid in a manner commensurate with a commission of this size and visibility. Reviews tell you whether the art is good. They rarely tell you whether the economics behind it are fair - and on that, as ever with the Turbine Hall, the public is left to listen and guess.