Tarek Atoui is an artist and composer working within the realm of sound. Exploring new methods of collaboration and production, Atoui’s work often revolves around performances that develop from his extensive research into music history and tradition. His use of sound challenges and expands established ways of understanding and experiencing this medium.
On the occasion of his Sharjah show, Cycles in 11, at Bait Al Serkal, Atoui speaks to the exhibition curator Hoor Al Qasimi, President and Director of Sharjah Art Foundation. They discuss the artist’s interest in the visceral and raw manifestations of sound and his long term association with Sharjah Art Foundation which facilitated his journey from the music world to the art world.
Excerpts:
Hoor Al Qasimi (HAQ): Years ago, you undertook a residency in Sharjah that changed the course of your career and began what is now more than a decade of collaboration, not only with Sharjah Art Foundation but also with the broader Sharjah community.
Tarek Atoui (TA): I was first invited to Sharjah in January 2008 to participate in the March Meeting. Around that time, I had initiated an educational project called ‘Empty Cans’ that toured Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon as well as the suburbs of Cairo. It involved educational software I had developed to allow children to play sound and video through PlayStation, joysticks and Wii remote.
I then came to the first edition of the March Meeting, which was attended by only a small number of people at that time, and I presented a short solo performance as part of the programme of talks and presentations. It was an important moment for me as it allowed me to reconnect with the Arab world. I had finished my studies in 2004, gone back to Lebanon, where I had toured ‘Empty Cans’ in 2005–2006, then the following year in Egypt. However, my connection to the Gulf and a much wider region came through the March Meeting and this invitation.
HAQ: More like a discussion group than a conference, the first March Meeting had only around two dozen invited attendees, who focused on issues faced by regional institutions and practitioners. Your contribution to the event, as you mention, was a performance that was extremely well received. Given also your interest in education and outreach to communities, it was an exciting prospect for us to continue to collaborate with you through a residency that would result in a new commission for Sharjah Biennial 9.
TA: In actuality, this was my first entry into the art world. Before that, I was mainly working with music, music studios and sound research centres. I am not a trained musician and was not particularly skilled or interested in writing scores, nor composing for film, dance or theatre. I was much more intrigued by a conceptual approach to sound, in its most visceral and raw manifestations. Consequently, the invitation to come to Sharjah and step into the art field was for me very liberating. It offered the possibility of moving away from the constraints of what it means to be a musician these days, particularly in new music, where the life of a musician is a lot about touring, releasing albums and depending on festivals.
Through the music world, I had never had the opportunity to undertake a residency where I could stay in a place for an extended period, engage with the local population, understand the reality of that place, perform outside of a concert hall and take what I was doing into other realms. This possibility came through Sharjah Art Foundation, where, following the March Meeting, I spent about five months developing the first of the ‘Un-drum’ series. The work, titled Un-drum / Strategies of surviving noise, was presented during Sharjah Biennial 9 as a solo performance in several acts, one of which took place outside Bait Al Serkal.
HAQ: You’ve mentioned that your residency in Sharjah had a significant impact on the development of Un-drum / Strategies of surviving noise. Throughout the months of your stay, you interacted with a wide range of people in Sharjah and began to understand the reality of this city. At the same time, you also developed an education programme that engaged with the community of Sharjah. Could you elaborate on that?
TA: Throughout the residency in Sharjah, I was staying and doing much of my work in a hotel, which was a unique experience for me. Over time I had many opportunities to interact with the workers at the hotel and the people at the reception desk. This helped me understand more about the reality of Sharjah. For Un-drum / Strategies of surviving noise, we set up a massive table with electronics and instruments I had built outside Bait Al Serkal, and we created a sort of pop-up performance that attracted people from the entire neighbourhood. It wasn’t planned, to be honest. Most of my performances in the Biennial had been in courtyards, but this time, due to a technical problem, the courtyard of Bait Al Serkal was taken for another event. The solution that arose was to have the performance outside the building in Arts Square, which proved to be a significant turning point. Internationals and locals blended as the Biennial audience and people who daily occupied Arts Square in front of the museum were all present. From children to elders, everyone was curious about this performance that appeared all of a sudden. This experience left us all with a solid impression of how sound can reach out to diverse groups of people and how performances can step into the public realm and federate or gather people in a way that is very different from the usual ways of communicating with audiences.
During this time, through my residency, I conceived an education programme that could reach various audiences in Sharjah, from the Foundation’s technicians, for whom a specialised programme on sound, video and computer techniques was developed, to the local cultural centres offering workshops for youth and children. Through Sharjah Art Foundation, I was also able to work with universities, where I gave talks, lectures and longer courses. I met a great number of teachers and students, some of whom were later to work at Sharjah Art Foundation.
HAQ: At that time, in 2009, Sharjah Art Foundation was established as a year-round initiative based on the framework of the Sharjah Biennial. We felt the need to engage more regularly with the local community, and this engagement became one of the Foundation’s core initiatives. As you are aware, both your participation in Sharjah Biennial 9 and your subsequent role at the Foundation were an inspiration for the development of the sound, performance and education programmes. Can you speak a little about this time in the development of your own practice?
TA: Sharjah became my anchor. Following the Biennial, my residency was extended, and I stayed in the residency apartment in the Bait Obaid Al Shamsi heritage house while also presenting projects internationally. I was living from only a suitcase that contained my equipment and some clothes! For eight years in a row, I was travelling this way, always returning to Sharjah, which was a home as well as the platform through which my work developed.
HAQ: In 2010, you also initiated the project Bytes and Pieces, a series of workshops and collaborations with different artists who explored new technologies and applied them to sound, performance and installations. This remarkable project connected artists with the community of Sharjah and resulted in later collaborations between the Foundation and the artists who participated. One of these artists, Basel Abbas, was invited to take part in Sharjah Biennial 12 in 2015. Abbas was commissioned to produce a video installation with Ruanne Abou-Rahme that was inspired by an experimental audio track. Their project was awarded one of the Biennial Prizes that year.
In early 2011, you became one of the technical coordinators and facilitators for Sharjah Biennial 10, which included numerous works and installations that used sound and other media such as film and video. Then, also in 2011, you returned to Sharjah and developed an important work inspired by Tarab music. This work, produced by Sharjah Art Foundation, was later performed internationally as well as in Sharjah.
TA: Yes, this became a large-scale production titled Visiting Tarab, which was presented for the first time in 2011 in New York. The second performance was in Sharjah in Calligraphy Square in 2012, when it was titled Re-visiting Tarab, and the third performance was in 2012 at the Serpentine Gallery in London, where it was presented as La Suite. Sharjah Art Foundation supported the research for the project and facilitated all of its presentations. Without this support, we would never have been able to realise such an ambitious project. This was also a very important phase in the development of my practice.
HAQ: After that project, I remember sending you an invitation, along with the director of the Sharjah City for Humanitarian Services, for a project with the Al Amal School for the Deaf called Below 160. This project eventually influenced your work WITHIN.
TA: In 2012, when I had the idea of working with sound and the Deaf community, I asked Sharjah Art Foundation to put me back in touch with the Sharjah City for Humanitarian Services and mainly Al Amal School for the Deaf. The project WITHIN started that year as an experimental project in collaboration with students from the school, who would come to Bait Obaid Al Shamsi to participate. We performed outside and conducted workshops that later unfolded into the sound and performance programme for Sharjah Biennial 11, curated by Yuko Hasegawa.
HAQ: Yuko and I invited you to create the sound and performance programme for Sharjah Biennial 11 in 2013, and you proposed taking your work with Al Amal School for the Deaf as its starting point and pushing the collaboration forward. With the relationship between sound and deafness as its basis, the programme was intended to challenge established modes of listening and to help develop an alternative approach to thinking about sound. At the time, we were very interested in taking this new direction and looking into the potential of your work for engaging with audiences through sound performances in outdoor public locations.
TA: Yes, this new project materialised as WITHIN and became part of the 2013 Sharjah Biennial. Sharjah gave me the opportunity to work on it with Sandra Terdjman and Gregory Castera (aka Council) and WITHIN was composed of different chapters. The first chapter involved 10 drummers from around the world—each one working in a different style, from jazz to noise to heavy metal—who had come to Sharjah to present both solo and ensemble performances, sometimes with local drummers. They all played for three days on rooftops and in roundabouts, parking lots and squares all over the city.
HAQ: It was a very significant project because events took place in extremely public locations in the centre of Sharjah during the opening of the Biennial, and afterwards in the courtyards of heritage houses. You also went to the town of Khorfakkan on the east coast of the Emirate of Sharjah and gave workshops at the university there. The Foundation was actively exploring ways of stepping out of the city centre, taking our work to other parts of the Emirate, learning more about the buildings and facilities, and engaging with the people who were living in these communities. The project was also taking place at the beginning of our efforts to acquire, preserve and repurpose buildings across the Emirate, such as the Kalba Ice Factory, the Kalba Kindergarden and the old Khorfakkan cinema. These and other disused buildings have been used as venues for Sharjah Biennials since that time.
TA: By 2013, I had gained so much experience from what WITHIN had generated here in Sharjah, and then the project really took off. It was subsequently developed and presented around the world, including at the Berkeley Art Museum, California (2015); EMPAC (The Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center), New York (2015); ZKM, Germany (2016); and the Bergen Assembly, Norway (2016). There was an entire new trajectory to it. The development of this project—this moment—has nourished my work and my thinking for the last seven years. The long-term collaboration with Sharjah Art Foundation not only introduced me to the art world and initiated my work as an artist dealing with sound, but it also allowed me to develop my work and think about education, about transmission, and honestly, to grow as a human being. It has really been quite remarkable.
HAQ: Since 2017, you and I have been talking about ways to take this history of collaboration further. Now, you are coming back to Sharjah, seven years after WITHIN and 11 years after that first performance outside of Bait Al Serkal. This current exhibition can be seen as a synthesis of all this accumulated knowledge and experience.
TA: Yes, Cycles in 11 resonates along all these lines. The residency programme and the idea of opening the project up internationally are things I have been very much interested in, mainly because of Sharjah’s privileged position as a link in the MENASA region, and, from a political perspective, because of the stability and long-term vision of Sharjah in the Arab world. It is one of the rare places in the Arab world with long-term planning that looks far ahead and offers artists working in contemporary art and new music the possibility to experiment and work outside the reach of their local context.
HAQ: For the residency programme in Cycles in 11, we discussed bringing musicians and sound artists to Sharjah and offering them a different perspective on the possibilities of new music and musical collaboration. The quality of the applicants we received was so high that we decided to extend the programme to two years, which means that it moves beyond the frame of the exhibition and expands its range and depth.
TA: Indeed, what I want from these residencies is for participants to displace themselves from what they are used to doing. What you can see in the invitation for the residents, and even for the performers, is the possibility of experimenting with things they would not have usually had access to. In the continuation of the organic nature of this project, and after our conversations, we considered extending this programme to make it about the region, its potential and the human resources we find along the way. In this dynamic, it is as if the exhibition is not an endpoint anymore or the closing of an 11-year cycle. On the contrary, it becomes another hub for experimentation and testing to see how this programme of two years can then unfold and how we can take it even further. These are the conversations we have been having. That is for me what Sharjah is about.
HAQ: The programme will bring together residents and residency advisors whom you have invited to assume an essential role in the exhibition. How do you envision the starting point of the residency? What are your plans for organising the residents’ time and experience of Sharjah?
TA: What we have been thinking is that the experience could start with the residents just being in the exhibition and listening to it. The whole of the heritage house Bait Al Serkal, where the exhibition is taking place, is a listening space and quite a sophisticated listening space. You can spend hours in it, and the sounds are changing all the time. Then there will be an in-depth guided tour with the residency advisors that presents the possibilities of the residency—what you can play, what you cannot play, what you can touch, what you cannot touch, and how things work. The idea of taking residents around Sharjah is essential because when they come on a residency here, especially in a context like this for a musician, they can be here all the time and not go out and not see anything. The idea, though, is that they engage with the place. We are planning to take them out to the small streets behind the hotel they are staying in, where all the electronics and textiles shops are, so that they get to see the local materials that people live with daily. Even the kitchen supply shops, the spices. It is essential for the residents to feel that they are in a place in this world that has a different dynamic and different connections from what they are used to. Another point to highlight here is the central location of Sharjah and its closeness to Iran, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal and the Philippines. I want the residents to see all these valuable connections, not just the connection to the West. These connections are just a mere fraction of all the complexity of this place. What I am interested in, first of all, is daily life here. It takes you on another path. Indeed, we are thinking about how we can organise this facilitation as much as possible.
HAQ: Beyond becoming familiar with the city of Sharjah, the residents will be engaging with the community of Sharjah. How will this add to their experience?
TA: Their engagement will be part of the discussions and an extension of what we talk about with them. Some are interested in giving a workshop about how they work—presenting their work methods in the form of talks and lectures—and some are interested in performing solo and collectively.
HAQ: The residency ties in closely with the Foundation’s ongoing outreach and work beyond our locations in the centre of Sharjah city and with our engagement across the Emirate. Your idea of going to Kalba with the residents resonates and prolongs the experience that you had in Khorfakkan in 2013. How do you plan to connect with the community there?
TA: This is a real challenge. However, the best way to deal with it is not having any expectations and keeping things as open as possible. We should take the lead first of all from the residents and the people who will be activating the space. The first intention in this is to offer them the former Kalba Kindergarten as a massive playground for experimenting with sound. I see Kalba as a hub that we can activate at multiple stages throughout this exhibition, even afterwards. The idea is to use it as sonic architecture that has polyvalence. With time, it will build up and offer the possibility for people living in the heart of Sharjah to go outside of Sharjah and work with us. The natural reserves and the mangrove close by Kalba are also a true inspiration, and a place I’m encouraging residents to go to and spend time in.
Tarek Atoui: Cycles in 11 was on view at Bait Al Serkal, Arts Square, Sharjah, from 19 September 2020 to 10 April 2021.