DeafSpace and Making Musical Instruments
Tarek Atoui
Artist, Paris
Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium
March 9, 2015, 7:30-9:00pm
The David Brower Center, Berkeley CA
Lectures are free and open to the public. Co-presented with the MATRIX program at the Berkeley Art Museum.
Reserve your ticket here.
About the talk: Atoui will present several of his ongoing projects each of which propose original methods for making instruments and the possibilities they open in terms of collaboration, performance and composition. In the Dahlem Sessions and the Reverse Sessions, Atoui inverted the order in which instruments are usually created, using the sounds of a collection of ethnic musical instruments located in the Dahlem Museum of Ethnology in Berlin as a starting point for imagining and building new instruments. This project was first presented in the 2014 Berlin Biennial and expanded in a solo exhibition presented at kurimanzutto gallery in Mexico City. For his MATRIX project at BAM/PFA, Atoui will build on WITHIN, a project that he initiated in Sharjah (UAE) in 2013, which is based on a series of conversations and collaborations with students from a school for the deaf.
About Tarek Atoui: Atoui is an electro-acoustic musician who initiates and curates multidisciplinary interventions, events, concerts and workshops in Europe and the Middle East. Tarek Atoui was born in Lebanon in 1980 and moved to Paris in 1998 where he studied contemporary and electronic music at the French National Conservatory of Reims. Co-artistic director of the STEIM Studios, Amsterdam (2008), Atoui released his first solo album in the Mort Aux Vaches series for the label Staalplaat (Amsterdam/Berlin) in 2006-07. He builds new software for each project and specialises in creating computer tools for interdisciplinary art forms and youth education.
Recent productions and performances have taken place in Fondation Louis Vuitton, France (2014), the Louvre, France (2013), Bonniers Konsthall, Sweden (2013), the Bienal de Mercosul, Brazil (2013), the Sharjah Biennal, United Arab Emirates (2013), and the Ruhr Triennal, Germany (2013). Much of Atoui’s work references social and political realities and presents music and new technologies as powerful tools of expression and identity. His pioneering youth workshop, Empty Cans, has been presented in France, Holland, Lebanon, Egypt, and in New York, as part of his Museum as Hub residency at the New Museum.
Atoui has been featured in the New Yorker. To hear more of his music, visit his MySpace or Soundcloud page.