Overview
Atoui will perform La Suite for his Park Night, and opening event for Serpentine Gallery’s three-day Memory Marathon, which takes place during Frieze Art Fair Week in London. This Sharjah Art Foundation Commission is presented by the Serpentine Gallery and made possible by the generous support of Badr Jafar.
Exploring Tarab both as a traditional form of music and an Arabic word to describe the emotional effect music has on the listener, Atoui is inviting fourteen internationally renowned musicians - from hip hop and electronic performers to contemporary and traditional instrumentalists - to create a dialogue with the collection of Kamal Kassar’s AMAR Foundation, which houses the largest library of Tarab and classical Arab music in the world. Atoui has long been captivated by the improvisation inherent in this deeply evocative music, which binds the audience to the performer. As Atoui says, ‘Tarab is not a music genre but a state of ‘melotrance’ that you reach after being exposed to music for a certain amount of time’.
La Suite is a development on Atoui’s earlier works Revisiting Tarab, performed in Sharjah this past March, and Visiting Tarab, performed in New York in November 2011 as a Performa Commission with the Sharjah Art Foundation. In London, Atoui’s performance will be a response to the theme of the Serpentine Memory Marathon. His interpretation of a largely forgotten genre of music promises to introduce the audience to a lost world of Arabic culture that dates back to the beginning of the 20th century.
The musicians who will be performing with Atoui include Uriel Barthelemi, John Butcher, Mira Calix, Susie Ibarra, Hassan Khan, Kazuyuki Kishino, Lukas Ligeti, Robert Lowe, Ikue Mori, Sara Parkins, Ghassan Sahhab, and Osama Shalabi. The collaborative performance will incorporate a wide range of instruments, from the more conventional and internationally familiar electric guitar, saxophone, drums, violin and harp, to staples of classical Arab music such as the oud and qanun, and more eccentric, alternative instruments such as a mixing board, laptop, tabletop mixer, voice synthesizer and marimba lumina.
The starting point for Atoui’s ongoing engagement with Tarab was the private music collection of Kamal Kassar, housed in the Lebanon-based AMAR Foundation (Arab Music Archiving & Research). His collection is made up of old 78 rpm shellac discs and studio tapes of music from the period between 1903 and 1950, encompassing the Arab ‘renaissance’ or nahda period which is said to have begun in the early nineteenth century and lasted into the 1930s. The collection comprises around 5500 disks and over 6,000 hours of tape recordings.
Atoui’s approach to engaging with Tarab involves inviting sound artists with different musical practices, styles and backgrounds to interact with Kassar’s collection. From genres as diverse as pop, hip hop, electronica, improvisation and noise art, Atoui looks for artists distinguished by their performance styles and experimentation with sound techniques and asks them to utilise Kassar’s library as a body of sound material from which to imagine and design live acts and performances.
The Serpentine Memory Marathon is the seventh annual festival of ideas inspired by the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2012, designed by Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei. This multi-disciplinary event will feature a wide range of participants, including leading artists, architects, filmmakers, musicians, scientists, theorists and writers in a continuous, performative programme of explorations, musical and theatrical performances, film screenings, discussions and experiments. The event will explore the overlaps and interactions between artistic practice and scientific enquiry. This year’s Marathon will approach memory as an active practice that can question received ideas – a probing of the old in the name of the new.
Tarek Atoui was born in Lebanon in 1980 and moved to France in 1998, where he studied sound art and electro-acoustic music. In 2006, he released his first solo album in the Mort Aux Vaches series for Staalplaat Records, and in 2008 he served as artistic director of the STEIM Studios in Amsterdam, a centre for the research and development of new electronic musical instruments. As a sound artist, Atoui initiates multidisciplinary interventions, events, concerts and workshops and specialises in creating computer tools for interdisciplinary projects and youth education. He has presented work internationally including at the Sharjah Biennial, UAE (2009), the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, USA (2010), La Maison Rouge, Paris, France (2010), the Mediacity Biennial, Seoul, South Korea (2010), the Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany (2010), Performa 11, New York (2011), and dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel, Germany (2012).
Tickets £10/8 available from the Serpentine Gallery Lobby Desk (020 7402 6075) or ticketweb.co.uk
For more information about the event and the Memory Marathon please visit, www.serpentinegallery.org/marathons