Can you feel a landscape’s rhythms? Tarek Atoui and the echo of improvisation

Following the retrospective dedicated to the master of contemporary sculpture and icon of Nouveau Réalisme, Jean Tinguely, Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca opens 2025 with a pioneering solo exhibition in Italy dedicated to Tarek Atoui.

In the industrial epicenter of Milan, within the architectural confines of the Shed at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Tarek Atoui transforms the space into a dynamic field of fluid and unpredictable resonances. Improvisation in 10 Days, his inaugural solo exhibition in Italy, is not merely an exhibition in the traditional sense but an experimental, living organism. This ever-evolving entity draws its vitality from interaction with the public. The Lebanese artist, renowned for his capacity to explore sound in its most elemental physicality, conceptualises the exhibition as a dynamic environment wherein materials, instruments, and bodies continuously vibrate in synchrony while simultaneously rewriting and re-listening.

Originally trained as a musician, Atoui has expanded the scope of his artistic practice by investigating sound’s sculptural and performative dimensions. His work is deeply embedded in field research that leads him to collaborate with artisans, musicians, and local communities, pioneering innovative methods of sound production and perception. From Beirut to Paris, his artistic practice is influenced by both geographical and cultural vectors, evolving into a form of art that interrogates and subverts conventional modes of listening.

The exhibition title evokes a stance of freedom and openness: improvisation not as mere randomness, but as a strategy to render the intangible tangible, to compose a dynamic structure that resists fixity. In the days preceding the opening, Atoui deconstructed and reassembled his installations, adapting them to the specificunique characteristics of the space as if tuning an instrument of architectural proportions. The resulting outcome is a multilayered acoustic landscape, a sonic ecosystem that invites visitors to engage in a nonlinear experience devoid of a definitive beginning or conclusion.

Upon entering the exhibition, visitors are immediately confronted with WITHIN (2013–ongoing), a body of work born from an extended dialogue with deaf communities. It proposes devices capable of transmuting sound into vibration and movement. In this context, sound is perceptible not only through auditory perception but also through the skin, space, and breath. The installation incorporates the Souffle Continu group, consisting of Organ Within (2022), a sculpture that reinvents the traditional organ and its performative, spatial, and perceptual characteristics, and the more recent Wind House #1 and #2 (2023-24), two “wind rooms” accessible to visitors, who can experience through their bodies the sound produced by a flow of air compressed and shaped by the transparent structure.

As viewers proceed through the exhibition, they encounter Waters’ Witness (2020–23), a sonic archive that revives the acoustic landscapes of distant ports: Athens, Beirut, and Singapore, among others. Marble blocks absorb and release sound waves, functioning as mute witnesses to a dissolving era. The marbles themselves, sourced from historic quarries, retain vestiges of the environments from which they were extracted, amplifying the concept of sonic memory and temporal stratification.

Ultimately, the journey leads up to  The Rain (2023–ongoing), the most recent segment of the exhibition: sculptural instruments crafted from bronze, wood, and strings transform the vibrations of water and air into tangible resonances, creating a choreography of elemental sounds. The artist draws inspiration from traditional percussion instrument-making techniques, incorporating materials such as copper and carbon fibre to achieve a spectrum of sounds ranging from profound and resonant to delicate and atmospheric.

Nevertheless, Improvisation in 10 Days is not confined to the passive contemplation of artworks. It extends an invitation to active participation, an experiential process realised only through the interplay between sound and the corporeal presence of the visitor. The public is not a passive observer but an integral constituent of the composition, urged to explore, touch, and feel. Yet, Atoui’s approach, while dismantling the traditional boundaries between the artwork and the audience, runs the risk of disorienting visitors in an art experience that feels more like a sensory exercise than a meaningful engagement with its deeper conceptual underpinnings.

In striving to transcend a fixed, predetermined structure, Atoui embraces an openness that mirrors historical avant-garde ideals, such as those seen in Situationism. Yet, within this radical openness lies a potential weakness: the exhibition risks disintegrating into an exercise in sensory indulgence, leaving the visitor with nothing to ground their experience beyond a fleeting moment of interaction. Without a guiding narrative or deeper theoretical exploration, the exhibition’s focus on pure sensory engagement could dilute its critical potential, reducing what could be a powerful critique of contemporary listening and perception into an abstract, self-referential spectacle. At the heart of Improvisation in 10 Days is a tension—one that questions whether art can evolve into an endless cycle of interaction, or whether it still requires structure, thought, and intention to unlock its full intellectual and emotional depth.

Tarek Atoui, Improvisation in 10 Days.
Pirelli HangarBicocca, Via Chiese, 2, 20126, Milan.
February 6, 2025 – July 20, 2025.

[Featured image: Tarek Atoui The Rain, Water Bubble System, 2023 (detail)
Mixed media installation Installation view, Art Sonje Center, Seoul, 2023
Courtesy the artist, Vitamin Creative Space © Ahina]

Lidia Militerno

Lidia Militerno is currently working on an MA in Modernism After Postmodernism at The Courtauld Institute of Art. Her fascination with art spans across various eras and styles, but she has a particular affinity for contemporary art and its evolving forms of expression.