Tarek Atoui: Souffle Continu, Sunflowers

Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) announces a major new exhibition by Lebanese sound artist and composer Tarek Atoui. Based in Paris, Atoui has built an international reputation for redefining how we encounter sound; through his immersive acoustic environments he creates a cognitive and sensory experience adapted to the architecture of each space. Through performance, collaborative instrument-making, and immersive installations, his work dissolves the boundaries between artist, audience, and instrument, inviting visitors into a shared, experimental field of listening.

Spanning two distinct spaces at IMMA; the Baroque Chapel and the galleries, the exhibition unfolds as a living system of vibration, rhythm, and movement. At its core is Souffle Continu, an installation in the Chapel that centres on the tactile and material qualities of sound, focusing on wind as both force and instrument. In the galleries, Sunflowers (2024–2025) draws on the rhythmic and material traditions of Korean drumming, transforming the space into an active environment for collective listening and production.

Souffle Continu operates as what Atoui describes as “a set of possibilities and a potential sound generator”, a framework capable of producing multiple compositions, interpretations, and collective situations. Begun in 2013 through workshops and dialogue with deaf students, the project evolved from Atoui’s WITHIN series, which explored sound beyond auditory perception. Instead of prioritising hearing, the works foreground vibration, gesture, and material presence, opening sonic experience to bodies with diverse hearing abilities.

The installation features a constellation of wind-driven instruments, including Organ Within and Wind Houses #1 & #2. Each object results from close collaboration with musicians, artisans, and educators, and has been tested and activated through workshops that probe its “playability.”

At the centre point of the installation is the Organ Within which emerged from a collaboration with Léo Maurel and Vincent Martial, drawing on research into church pipe organs, modular synthesizers, and the perception of tone by deaf listeners. Air is channelled through pipes laid across the ground like tentacles, producing amplified vibrations and deep frequencies that resonate through the listener.

The installation in the Chapel consists of multiple instruments; Wind House #1 and Wind House #2 are immersive sound chambers that visitors are invited to enter. Wind House #1 is inspired by SubBass Prototone, an experimental organ pipe created in the 1980s by Johannes Goebel, whose monumental proportions Atoui has carefully replicated. Wind House #2 features a more elongated structure, producing a distinct spatial resonance.

In the galleries, Sunflowers shifts attention to rhythm and material memory. Inspired by Korean drumming traditions, the works function as sculptural listening devices that recalibrate the acoustic environment of the space. Here, the gallery becomes both immersive soundscape and communal workshop. Visitors are invited to engage in collaborative sessions, generating sonic materials that feed back into the installation. Sound is not fixed or composed in advance; it emerges through interaction, movement, shared experimentation and improvisation. Listening becomes an active, social practice, one that accumulates and transforms as vibrations pass through surfaces, bodies, water, and air.

Related works such as The Whisperers and Whispering Playground expand this ecosystem. Industrial hums, flowing water, percussion, and vinyl recordings circulate through a water-based circuit, revealing how sound behaves as a material in motion. Everyday objects; pipes, chambers, containers are reimagined as acoustic agents. The ordinary becomes resonant, and activated. Atoui approaches the world not as a collection of passive objects but as a field of animate matter. As he reflects, the choice of material is never neutral; it signals a relation to the world and a way of being within it.

This exhibition at IMMA offers more than a presentation of sound art. It is an invitation to enter a shared sensory experiment to feel vibration travel through materials, and to rediscover listening as a collective, embodied act.

The programme culminates in a live performance on March 21 featuring musicians Natalia Beylis and Áine O’Dwyer, activating the installations. 

The exhibition is curated by Mary Cremin, Head of Programming at IMMA.