Sissel Tolaas RE________
Astrup Fearnley Museet, 2021
Formafantasma worked in close collaboration with Sissel Tolaas to develop the exhibition design for RE________. Composed of site-specific works that address the sense of smell rather than sight and hearing, Tolaas activates a different type of engagement and perception with the visitors. Through rethinking, reconstructing, revisiting, repeating, redesigning and reacting, current topics of climate change, food industry and diversity are presented in smell scapes that the visitor can encounter in various rooms and installations.
For Sissel Tolaas, smell is a vital yet often overlooked tool for communication. Over nearly three decades, she has devoted her research-based artistic practice to the olfactory, rather than the visual or the auditory, with investigations ranging from in-depth research and analysis to the archiving and synthetic (re)production of smell molecules and structures. Throughout her practice, Tolaas has built an archive of ‘smell recordings’, consisting of around ten thousand smell molecules.
In the Self_Life_Portrait, ocean water is pumped into the museum via the main entrance and recirculated to provide water for the installation. The soap replicates the smell of Sissel Tolaas.
In AL_earth_22, the 44 lab glasses contain 44 molecules and represent an ongoing research on the topic of earth’s chemistry and chemical ecology.
Sensors on the coastline of Norway record the breeze and smell of the ocean, and the AirREborn installation reports and translates this information into the space – the ocean smell is embedded in the ventilator, and the strength of wind comes visible through the movement of the textiles.
Salmo_NO_Way is an installation where the 30 neon light tubes represent 30 chemicals from salmon farm nutrition and reflect on the topics of contemporary salmon industry – the pink gold, ocean biodiversity, marine biology, nature and artificiality, pollution.
