If it's the second week in October then something new must have appeared in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. And as ever the question is "has someone finally done something decent?"
Probably.
This is Hold by Tarek Atoui, a musical artwork comprising umpteen specially-constructed instruments. There are pipes and drums and mouthorgans and what look like bells but I think are actually horns, also mechanised mallets that occasionally hit things. There are also a lot of cables and loudspeakers because the instrumental music plays, very variedly, interspersed with wheezy strings and electronic sounds. It is, according to the Lebanese artist, a transformation of the Turbine Hall into "a sonic landscape connecting earth and sky".
There's something 1920s Heath Robinson about it, in that you almost expect some ball will come rolling down the pipework and strike some percussive membrane before landing in a metal bowl. Alas it's rather more static than that, other than the mallets, all powered by electronic signals, long cables and a row of laptops on a table at the back. The eclectic orchestra includes Korean drums, Uzbek horns and Chinese polyphonic reed instruments, also apparently the dangly textile strips generate and transmit sound although that may just be artbolx. Other noises include ambient sound reworked through the loudspeakers, and yesterday I heard something bleepy, something double bassy and a lot that was whooshy.
Officially it opens today but the good thing about an enormous intervention in a public space is that you can easily see it the day before. Even better I got to see the artist himself wandering around adding some finishing touches, or perhaps engaged in a desperate race against time to get everything switched on. Some folk were also wiring up a drum kit because one of the performative aspects here is that musicians will sometimes be invited to play along. Tarek himself is participating this weekend alongside Emptyset, Mazen Kerbaj, Kenichi Iwasa and Aya Metwalli.
It's always nice when a Turbine Hall installation is interactive but here the best on offer is sit to on a stone slab, some of which have embedded speakers, and feel the vibrations. I didn't get to try this because downstairs was all sealed off, this the downside of going before it's all properly open. But I did get a good view of the assemblage from the upper mezzanine, also a chance to stand under the sugar/bamboo horns hanging alone up the other end of the hall, also sound carries so you can hear it anywhere.
The Turbine Hall is a tough space to fill and many former contributors have fallen flat. What Atoui gets right is to use the height, just as those floating aerobes did in 2021, and also to flood the space with sound, just as 2003's golden sun once flooded it with light. It's not quite a must-see, it's been years since we had one of them, but it does trounce the recent reindeer bones, manky skins, bottletops and Andean knots. And it's here until April so you've got ages to remember it's here, drop by and have a listen.
