Tarek Atoui: Forgotten Tales Through Time and The Sahara Chapter

Hartwig Art Foundation presents Forgotten Tales Through Time, a one-night concert by artist and composer Tarek Atoui, featuring musicians from the Amazigh community in Morocco’s Atlas region. The standalone performance at De Balie in Amsterdam on Thursday, March 6, 2025 launches The Sahara Chapter, a new iteration of Atoui’s major research and exhibition project At-Tāriq (2022–ongoing), a long-term investigation of diasporic music traditions. Inspired by the Majlis—traditional gathering spaces for communities in the Arab world, from the Atlas Mountains of Northern Africa to the Arabian Gulf, where guests and travelers from further afield are welcomed—the performance brings a collective display of the artist’s ongoing exploration of “poetic hospitality” to Amsterdam. Marking the beginning of a three-year-long research project with Hartwig Art Foundation and several future performances in the Netherlands, this meeting of musical traditions bridges multiple cultural worlds to create a powerful dialogue between past and present, traditional, and contemporary.

Crossing geographies from North to South and East to West, The Sahara Chapter, commissioned and produced by Hartwig Art Foundation, extends Atoui’s ongoing artistic journey through Morocco and Saudi Arabia, and the ancient routes that connected the Maghreb with the Arabian Peninsula. It follows The Tamazgha Chapter—commissioned and produced by TBA21—a journey on which Atoui guides us through the ancestral lands of the Amazigh people who believe Tamazgha to be the source and repository of musical, artistic, artisanal, and intellectual traditions. 

The collaboration with Hartwig Art Foundation sees Atoui embark on a significant period of transnational research in the Netherlands. With a notable count of inhabitants of North African descent in cities such as Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Utrecht North, each has diasporic communities from countries such as Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Egypt. By expanding its scope further to Tunisia and Algeria, which like Morocco, have long been significant crossroads for migration, trade, and cultural exchange, Atoui deepens his investigation into the region’s rich sub-Saharan cultural and musical heritage, fostering a greater understanding of its interwoven histories. In the spirit of unity, inclusion and hospitality, collaborations with musicians, craftsmen, and ethnomusicologists from these communities in the Netherlands form a critical part of At-Tāriq’s new chapter. They celebrate and reflect on the rich, hybrid identities forged in the diaspora, by blending traditional techniques with contemporary artistic methods, culminating in new sound pieces, crafts, and performances that reach beyond time and place.

In At-Tāriq, music itself becomes hospitable. Emphasizing shared artistic expression and dialogue as powerful tools to bridge divides, Atoui’s work highlights how migration—both historical and contemporary—can lead to the exchange of knowledge and artistic practices. 

Tickets for the concert on March 6, 2025

Performance credits
Artist and Composer: Tarek Atoui
Musicians: Said Ait Lhaj, Lahcen Amarrak, Aicha Boukhris, Fadoua Ennouri, Susie Ibarra, Ijja Id Haddou, Nancy Mounir, Ziúr

About Tarek Atoui
Tarek Atoui (Beirut, 1980) is a French-Lebanese artist and electroacoustic composer working within the realm of sound performance and composition. He engineers complex and inventive instruments as well as arranges and curates interventions, concerts, performances, and workshops. His work often revolves around large-scale, collaborative performances that develop from extensive research into music history and instrumentation, while exploring new methods of production.

Using custom-built electronic instruments and computers, Atoui references current social and political realities, revealing music and new technologies as powerful aspects of expression and identity. Education and social connection are integral aspects of Atoui’s Practice. Tarek Atoui lives and works in Paris, France.

Tarek Atoui’s concert Forgotten Tales Through Time in Amsterdam is a continuation of a series of concerts resulting from a new research project commissioned and produced by TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. 

The Amsterdam concert marks the launch of The Sahara Chapter, a new three-year research project by Tarek Atoui, commissioned by Hartwig Art Foundation.