Tarek Atoui. At-Tāriq.

Exhibition at Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum - Madrid

February 18 – May 18, 2025

MNTB Madrid

Diseño: Goda Budvytyte

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February, 18–May, 18. 2025
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza 

The Majlis is the traditional space of hospitality in Arab and North African homes. It is where one receives guests and travelers, offering shelter and conviviality to those arriving from afar. Hospitality is also the key proposition in Tarek Atoui’s new long-term research and exhibition project, At-Tāriq, meaning "The Nightcomer" or "The Morning Star." Here, hospitality extends to what could be called “poetic hospitality”—an openness to collaboration, a sympathy between sensibilities, and a morphology of alliance. The night, after all—in many cultures—belongs to a different order, connected to the unknowable, to intimacy, and the poetic.

In At-Tāriq: the Tamazgha Chapter, Atoui embarks on a long-term investigation into rural musical forms of the Arab World along the sub-Saharan roads of pilgrimage and trade. For this first iteration, he guides us to the ancestral lands of the Amazigh people, the Tamazgha. In Amazigh culture, Tamazgha is more than a homeland; it is the source and repository of musical, artistic, artisanal, and intellectual traditions. Emerging from two years of exchange with musicians and artisans from Morocco’s Atlas region and well beyond, the opening chapter of At-Tāriq at MNTB proposes a space of poetic hospitality composed around the Majlis. It is a space that holds, welcomes, and resonates while generating a multiplicity of affinities and experiences. 

In At-Tāriq, music itself becomes hospitable. Through its layered sonic and material textures, the exhibition invites its guests to inhabit the thresholds between the traditional and the contemporary, the familiar and the unknown, unlocking the nomadic inclinations within these affinities.

A prelude concert in Marrakesh
As a prelude to his forthcoming exhibition in Madrid, Tarek Atoui presents Forgotten Tales Through Time in Marrakesh, a concert with a traditional ensemble from Ouarzazate and Zagora, featuring the musicians Lahcen Amarrak, Said Ait Lhaj, Aicha Boukhris, Fadoua Ennouri, Fatima El Habibi, Ijja Id Haddou, Mohamed El Kartaoui, and Mohamed El Malyani. This unique experience will take place on January 31 at 4.30 pm at the Monde des Arts de la Parure as part of the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair.

This concert marks their first joint performance, blending Amazigh music with Atoui's electro-acoustic experimentation. The program celebrates the tradition of long poems and oral stories from the region, passed down from generation to generation. These ‘singers of ten thousand verses’ preserve ancient stories, some based on classical Arab epics, others inspired by local legends or everyday life, narrated with a hypnotic cadence.

A second iteration Madrid on March 3, as part of the program of the ARCO International Art Fair and the public program of the exhibition, reunites Atoui with the Moroccan ensemble alongside the three artists who collaborated with him on the exhibition’s soundscape: the percussionist Susie Ibarra (New York/Berlin), the musician Nancy Mounir (Cairo), and the DJ-composer Ziúr (Berlin).