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This article is part of the Fine Arts & Exhibits special section on the art world stretching boundaries with new artists, new audiences and new technology.
It’s rare to experience art in a nearly totally dark room. But last year at the National Nordic Museum in Seattle, that’s where visitors found themselves when they entered “FLØÐ (Flood),” a site-specific installation created by the Icelandic artist and musician Jonsi (Jon Birgisson).
Lit only by an LED strip running the length of the ceiling, the installation featured gentle fog misting into the space and looping audio of some 25 minutes of Jonsi’s music. Featuring choral singing and field recordings made in the Icelandic countryside, the sound rolled through the room like a wave. The subtle scent that wafted in via hidden diffusers was an earthy coastal smell crafted from tinctured and distilled seaweed.
Today, artists like Jonsi and his family-run collective, Fischersund, are moving art beyond the realm of the visual and into experiences that need to be heard, felt and even smelled to be believed. The success of these experiences has inspired them to keep creating them.
“I just love triggering the senses,” said Jonsi via a video call from his home in Los Angeles. “When you go into an art exhibition, you just want to feel something, you want to be moved.”
By any measure, “FLØÐ,” which ran from March to July 2023, was a smashing success. The museum’s chief curator Leslie Anne Anderson said that the museum experienced a 12.5 percent increase in membership during the exhibition, parts of which traveled to the Reykjavik Art Museum’s Hafnarhús (Harbor House).
Visitors returned again and again to the misty space in Seattle, often sitting in the dark, sound- and scent-filled room for hours at a time.
“I was completely floored by the experience,” said Bryan Mamaril, a 47-year-old Seattleite who bought a museum membership after his first visit and returned several times. “Some of the people I brought to the exhibition were moved to tears.”
Unsurprisingly, the National Nordic Museum is continuing on the track of multisensory exhibitions with “Faux Flora,” also created by Jonsi and Fischersund, which opens Nov. 8 and runs through Jan. 26. Chronicling the life of a flower, the exhibition, also curated by Anderson, is broken into five “chapters” mirroring human life stages: birth, childhood, adolescence, maturity and old age. Each section contains visuals of imagined plant life, along with a unique soundscape and custom scent. The scents, like all those created by Fischersund and sold at their perfumery in Reykjavik, Iceland, originate from the family’s memories of growing up in that country, and incorporate such ingredients as anise seed and Icelandic Sitka spruce.
Forgoing the typical opening reception model, the museum is instead planning a to kick off the exhibition with a scented concert, featuring Jonsi and the musicians Kjartan Holm and Sin Fang.
“In today’s society, there is this deep need for connection, and it has been so interesting to feel how scent can connect people,” said Lilja Birgisdottir, Jonsi’s sister and a member of Fischersund. “We are so used to looking at images with our critical brain, but scent bypasses all those critical walls and just goes straight into our little hearts.”
“FLØD” and “Faux Flora” are not the only exhibits seeking to reach straight into visitors’ hearts via the senses. Right now, the Brand Library & Art Center in Glendale, Calif., is showing “Blended Worlds: Experiments in Interplanetary Imagination” (through Jan. 4), an exhibition that includes Saskia Wilson-Brown’s installation “Sensory Mementos,” featuring scents inspired by outer space. The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, in Birmingham, England, is showing “Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites” (through Jan. 26), in which custom scents accompany paintings of the era that depict people smelling or distributing fragrances. And back at the National Nordic Museum, a show on New Nordic Cuisine, planned for 2025, is to explore the relationship between scent and taste.
The first major museum exhibition to focus on scent as an artistic medium, “The Art of the Scent 1889-2012,” was mounted at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York in 2012. Since then, other museums have started experimenting with incorporating touch, taste and smell into their shows.
“Since the 1990s, art museums have developed a pronounced interest in the senses generally,” Jim Drobnick, a critic and an associate professor of contemporary art and theory at OCAD University, Toronto, wrote in an email. “Museum exhibitions specifically focusing on scent took another decade or so. Artists today are likely to work in all forms of media and with a vast array of materials, many of which have a pronounced sensory dimension.”
Jonsi is one such artist. “We’re so used to using our eyes and thinking that art is something you look at on the wall, but artists like Jonsi are exploring the extrasensory,” said Ethan Sklar. Sklar is the senior partner at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, which represents Jonsi and has mounted three solo exhibitions by the artist, including one that evoked the feeling of being inside an active volcano.
For other curators working with multisensory artworks, the draw is physical.
“These artists are reorienting our relationship to how our bodies perceive and make sense of the world,” said Nina Bozicnik, senior curator at the Henry Art Gallery, a contemporary art museum at the University of Washington in Seattle. For its 2023 “Thick as Mud” exhibition, Bozicnik worked with Candice Lin, who had created “Swamp Fat” (2021), an installation in the museum’s rotunda. It included pedestals displaying ceramic vessels shaped like swamp creatures made of clay from a former Louisiana fishing village, thought to be the country’s first Asian American settlement. Lin filled the vessels with lard infused with the scent of decay from vermin carcasses and dried shrimp.
Lin, who is set to talk about olfactory art at the Corning Museum of Glass in conjunction with the museum’s fall show, “Sensorium: Stories of Glass and Fragrance” (through Feb. 1), noted that she uses scent in her work as a tool to disrupt colonialist narratives, especially those around individualism.
“It’s a way to rethink the imagination that we’re self-enclosed individuals, and instead think about how we’re always entangled by other species and humans and our larger environment,” she said.
Other artists use scent to peel back the layers of what exactly composes the stuff — both visible and invisible — of our environments.
At the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, the chief curator Andrew Bolton engaged Sissel Tolaas, an artist who works with smell, to analyze via forensic chemistry several archival garments in the museum’s “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” exhibition, which ran through Sept. 2. Tolaas extracted and reproduced the garments’ smell molecules, displaying them for visitors in test tubes and scented wall paint.
For Tolaas, who lives and works in Berlin, smell is not merely a component, but rather the central focus of her research and art.
“The audience interacts with the smells as the primary content, engaging bodily and deeply with the emotions, memories, and thoughts that the smells communicate and provoke,” she said in a recent video interview.
“Smell allows you to engage with the topic of concern with your emotions,” she explained. “Without emotional reaction, there can be no action.”
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