Tarek Atoui - Within
/Tarek Atoui’s project WITHIN tackles the ways in which deafness can influence our understanding of sound performance, its space and instrumentation. Initiated in 2012 and enhanced by the collaboration of the curatorial duo Council (Sandra Terdjman & Grégory Castera), WITHIN carried on its evolution with the project’s invitations and exhibitions: Sharjah Biennial (2013), Berkeley Art Museum, USA (2015), Experimental Music and Performing Art Center - EMPAC, USA (2015), ZKM, Germany (2016), and more recently at the Bergen Assembly, Norway (2016).
For the Bergen Assembly, where Tarek Atoui was also artistic co-director, the artist developed new instruments which expend the notion of hearing, beyond orality.
The design of the instruments and their playability are the result of workshops and residencies where Tarek Atoui progressively made an instrumentarium in cooperation with acoustic instrument makers, speaker designers, software engineers, composers and Deaf and hearing people. In September 2016, the instruments were brought together for the first time in Sentralbadet, a forsaken swimming-pool located in the center of Bergen (Norway) where composers and musicians, both amateur and professional, Deaf and hearing people, were welcome to take possession of the exhibition space and test these instruments, playing separately or as an ensemble.
The exhibition WITHIN at the Galerie Chantal Crousel culminates in a new chapter after the Bergen edition. The instrumentarium will become a sound installation replaying some of the past performance recordings and offering its audience new sound apprehension methods, whether they are physical, tactile, visual or aural. For the project’s Parisian iteration, the instruments will also be activated during workshops, rehearsals and performances which will take place at the gallery and outdoor, with the collaboration of the INJS (National Institute for Young Deafs in Paris), the Centre Pompidou and the IRCAM (Research and Acoustic/Music Coordination Institute). The latter is also a co-producers of a new instrument soon to be finalized and created for WITHIN.
Opening performances on February 18, 2017 with Thierry Madiot, Robert Demeter, Kaja M. Olsen. Watch the video here.
On account of the evolving nature of WITHIN, the Galerie Chantal Crousel will also present the early rehearsal of its performances at Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels (May 2017), in partnership with the Wiels.
