Sissel Tolaas: RE________

The first major US exhibition of smell researcher and artist Sissel Tolaas opens at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) at the University of Pennsylvania this fall. Over the course of the past 25 years, Tolaas has developed an artistic and scientific practice using smell as her primary medium, composing provocative smells to activate memory, recreate place and time, capture seasonality and arouse emotional and intellectual responses. The exhibition Sissel Tolaas: RE________, exemplifies the breadth of this complex yet highly researched, direct and intuitive practice. 

The exhibition is comprised of 20 works that use smell to consider a broad range of pressing issues, including climate change, evolution,  geopolitics and anthropology. Tolaas rethinks, reconstructs, revisits, and reacts to these issues in her practice through her intangible, but highly sensory medium. Between each “situation,” or project throughout the exhibition, Tolaas encourages visitors to reflect on their body and the air they breathe, focus on new impressions and revisit old ones. Recognizing that smell as a sense has the greatest capacity to instantly evoke memory and emotion, Tolaas’s work powerfully explores the concept of experience, of the unknown and even the (un)pleasantly familiar. 

For Tolaas, smell is a vital yet often overlooked tool for communication. Before you see or experience something, many of us smell it. In the course of a single day, a person on average breathes in and out around 24,000 times. With every breath, irresistible signals are sent straight to the brain’s hippocampus—smells, that in a matter of nanoseconds trigger emotions and memories, stirring up the subconscious in turn. Tolaas, who operates from her research lab and studio in Berlin, has been collecting and mapping smells from around the world for over 25 years. Since the early 90s, she has had a profound interest in chemical processes, sensory ecology and the phenomenon of change. Early in her career, these primarily manifested as formal experiments and mathematical calculations that explored how different chemicals and substances, organic as well as inorganic, affect one another and are interdependent. Since then, Tolaas has built multiple archives of “smell recordings,” consisting of around ten-thousand smell molecules and smell constructs. She has also established a unique smell lexicon, aptly named NASALO, which contains 4,200 paralinguistic sounds and is in constant development. 

The exhibition invites visitors to use all of their senses, to engage with the works on view on a physical and visceral level, and experience the show for themselves with their whole body and mind. As Tolaas notes, “Without an emotional reaction there is no action.”

For Tolaas, the exhibition has neither instructions nor explanations. Codes relating to a larger score accompany each of the works in place of text descriptions and draw attention to the themes of the exhibition—identity, memory, power, communication and the environment. The choice of how to experience the exhibition rests entirely with the visitor, who can either accept the artist’s invitation to roam freely and connect the codes, or opt to dig deeper in the Reveal room of the exhibition, where an array of tear sheets provides a meticulously coded narrative with more information and keys to the works. The exhibition becomes a playground for everyone and organically generates joy and engagement.

This exhibition is organized by Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo and curated by Solveig Øvstebø, Astrup Fearnley Museet’s Executive Director and Chief Curator. The presentation here has been specially configured for the ICA, and is organized with Zoë Ryan, Daniel W. Dietrich, II Director.

Support for Sissel Tolaas: RE________ has been provided by The Inchworm Fund, the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), the Royal Norwegian Consulate General in New York, International Flavors & Fragrances Inc., and Kvadrat Inc. The exhibition presentation at Astrup Fearnley Museet is generously supported by the Foundation Thomas Fearnley, Heddy and Nils Astrup, The Foundation Hans Rasmus Astrup, EGD Holding, and The Thief. Additional support has been provided by Nancy & Leonard Amoroso, Cecile & Christopher D’Amelio, Carol & John Finley, Norma & Lawrence Reichlin, Meredith & Bryan Verona, and Caroline & Daniel Werther.

About Sissel Tolaas
Sissel Tolaas (born in 1965 in Norway; based in Berlin) is an artist and smell researcher whose nearly 30-year practice and study of the impact of smells draws upon her background in chemistry, mathematics, linguistics and art. Working at the forefront of her field, her projects have been shown at the Venice Biennale, the Gwangju Biennale, MoMA New York, the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia, the Dia Art Foundation New York, and the Tate Modern London, among others. In 2004, she established the Smell RE-SearchLab Berlin with support from IFF Inc. She has worked with universities, research institutes and companies all over the world.