Tarek Atoui. Al Tāriq
A Journey into the Rural Music Traditions of North Africa and the Arab World
February 18 –
May 18, 2025
Tarek's studio_November 2024 © Alexandre Guirkinger
MNTB Madrid
Exhibitions
EN / ES
February–May, 202
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.
February–May, 202
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.
