Tarek Atoui: The Whisperers at Galerie Chantal Crousel

October 18th — November 20th, 2021

Images courtesy of Tarek Atoui and Galerie Chantal Crousel

Galerie Chantal Crousel is pleased to present a new exhibition by Tarek Atoui. The artist shows his new series, The Whisperers (2021), which continues his investigations of sound and the way it can sculpt perceptions. Tarek Atoui’s hybrid compositions create soundscapes where sound morphs through a phenomenon of translation. This new ensemble is partly inspired by experiments pursued with a kindergarten class on the acoustics and vibratory frequency of objects, water, wind, voices, and rotational movements.

The Whisperers conceived by Tarek Atoui’s, is a series of listening devices composed of different materials that conduct and amplify sound in multi-sensory ways. These assemblages bring together plastic, wood, brass, water, bronze, glass and stone, experimenting with each material acoustic properties and the unique ways they transmit and reflect sound. Through The Whisperers, Atoui invites the visitor to interact and experience it in fresh and innovative ways, they offer a medium for discovery and unpredictable, undoing the familiar and known.

Between October 2020 and January 2021, a first set of The Whisperers was created for the trust & confusion exhibition curated by Raimundas Malasauskas at the Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong-Kong. For his exhibition at Galerie Chantal Crousel, Atoui has created a new series of The Whisperers influenced and inspired by five workshop sessions that took place between November 2020 and June 2021 in a kindergarten classroom, l’École alsacienne in Paris, with 5-year-old students.

An interview between Tarek Atoui and Audrey Belmin, teacher at l’École alsacienne, recounting the experience of transmission within a kindergarten classroom, and observations on sound realized during workshop sessions are available here. For more inspiration around wall art, you can check out Niche Canvas for a variety of designs.