The10th Mercosul Biennial opened in Porto Alegre, Brazil with a major exhibition on smell: Olfactory: Smell in Art.
olfactory art
Eduardo Kac is internationally recognized for his telepresence and bio art. Osmobox drawings were exhibited at Galerie Charlot in Paris (2014). Osmoboxes are visually identical but completely distinct in their olfactory identity. Every scent in the Osmobox series is unique and constitutes the core of the artwork.
What does scent have to do with art? At first glance, nothing, it seems. But scent has long been a part of art on many levels, and is increasingly so nowadays. From the materials and processes used to produce art to the subject matters of the work itself, scent—whether present physically or only in memory or the imagination—is part of the reality of art. In cooperation with the Scent Culture Institute, Kunstmuseum Thun is presenting a year-long series of four exhibitions at Projektraum Enter examining the sense of smell through the museum’s collection. Through the series, Projektraum Enter will act as an experimental place for olfactory exploration, from the what and how art is made, and how we perceive it, to the artistic evocations of smell, be they in still lives, city scenes, landscapes, abstractions, or the real world.
The submissions are open for the 2016 Art and Olfaction Sadakichi Award for Experimental Scent (olfactory art).
In addition to the curatorial exhibition statement presented earlier, below are views of the three positions presented in EPHEMERAL MATERIALITIES: Scent in Swiss Art, as well as further information about the works.
Maki Ueda will be giving a 3 weeks course on olfactory art titled “How to Confuse Your Senses” in The Netherlands.
The olfactory sense, though often forgotten, is a powerful connector to memory and emotions. Diary of Smells: Shards (Estilhaços) is an on-going multi-sensorial interactive & interdisciplinary project comprised of various stages of smell production, photographs and sound design.
INVERSES is a multi-sensory project and collaboration between six artists in five countries, who have been working on it for the past 2 years. The result is a set of items consisting of an illustrated storybook, a soundtrack, and a trio of custom scents, which all share a common narrative on the journey of a roving cardboard box.
Olfactory Memoirs challenges both emerging and experienced writers to reconstruct memories through the sense of smell.
Not only physical boundaries still set apart Hong Kong and China even after the reunification, but there are also invisible segregation like scent between the two places. This art project by Morgan Wong works with this situation.
Olfactory art is on the cutting edge of the multi-sensorial art experience. Denver Art Museum (DAM) is out in front of this trend with their ongoing collaborative efforts with perfumer and olfactory artist, Dawn Spencer Hurwitz.
Perhaps the most prolific olfactory artist today, Peter de Cupere has indeed been very busy recently!
A major new publication in French on contemporary olfactory art is out now from Classiques Garnier. The book gathers the input of experts from different disciplinary fields (philosophers, art historians, neurobiologists, artists, and perfumers) who examine the conditions behind the emergence of olfactory art and explore contemporary artistic practices founded on odor and perfume.
Anicka Yi now tackles the matter of forgetting by creating new work that refers to and takes up themes from her past production and incorporates an exhibition-specific smell—the scent of forgetting—which wafts through the galleries.
Pamela Rosenkranz’s Swiss Pavilion in Venice to the Serpentine Gallery’s own perfume, Alice Hattrick investigates the art world’s increasing engagement with scent.