The current exhibition Inhale – Hold – Exhale at the Kunstmuseum Thun is the first institutional show of the Danish artist Jeppe Hein in Switzerland (until 29 July 2018). The exhibition takes up the subject of breath and Hein’s exploration of the subject in different ways. In a subtle way it also points at the sense of smell since “breath”  and “smell” are brothers as Patrick Süskind once described it his novel:

People could close their eyes to greatness, to horrors, to beauty, and their ears to melodies or deceiving words. But they could not escape scent. For scent was the brother of breath. Together with breath it entered human beings, who could not defend themselves against it, not if they wanted to live. And scent entered into their very core, went directly to their hearts, and decided for good and all between affection and contempt, disgust and lust, love and hate. He who ruled scent ruled the hearts of men.

Hein’s works induce the awareness of body and mind, refer to the active perception of all the senses and are an invitation to wonder, to decelerate and also to smile. The exhibition will be characterised by different participatory elements. Hein turns viewers into actors and surprises us with the unexpected.

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Here is the reference for the image & catalogue:

Source: Suskind, Patrick. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. Trans. f. E. Woods. New York: Pocket Books/Simon and Schuster, 1986, 189.