What does communism smell like? How about the Sun, or Cleopatra’s perfume, or the atomic blast that destroyed the city of Hiroshima? This booklet, published on the occasion of the exhibition If There Ever Was, attempts to bring distant, elusive, and sometimes impossible olfactory experiences to life. Curator Robert Blackson commissioned thirteen fragrances from eleven perfumers and smell artists, including Bertrand Duchaufour, Christophe Laudamiel, Christoph Hornetz, Mark Buxton, Sissel Tolaas, and Geza Schön. If, like me, you missed the show at the Reg Vardy Gallery, this booklet gives you a chance to smell them all in the comfort of your own home.

Each scent of the exhibition is encapsulated in a scratch-n-sniff card, and comes with a short explanatory text. What these fragrances have in common is that they all refer to objects that are absent from our experience: they represent things that are temporally and/or spatially remote. There are no traces, for instance, of the original recipe to Cleopatra’s perfume; we can only guess what it really smelled like…

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