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What does a Vincent van Gogh painting smell like? If it's a vase of sunflowers, you'll get a spritz of citrus and lavender to evoke the south of France, where the post-impressionist created these works. As you're served wine and cheese, Bach's Prelude No. 1 in C Major will be piped through the speakers.
— The Lume, an "immersive gallery" in Melbourne, opens next month. Read more in You've never seen (or smelled, or tasted) a van Gogh like this at The Age.
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So in the case of World War I… I was supposed to do a permanent smell for the [Dresden Museum of Military History] museum opening. I had to construct the smell of gruesome battlefields—dead horses, dead bodies, shit, pee, you name it. I constructed a smell that was so awful; even myself, I had problems. Then the German government came to my lab and said, ‘Ms Tolaas, this is too extreme.’ I said, ‘But war is extreme. Should I turn it into a rose garden?’ So I reconstructed a more extreme smell with gas, and I called it World War I. It was installed in 2010 and immediately people started vomiting from it. My mission was accomplished.
— Smell artist Sissel Tolaas, in Meet the fragrance scientist behind Balenciaga’s blood-and-money perfume at Document.
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Visitors won’t see a physical artwork; instead they are led into a chamber where they can play with several atomisers filled with essences extracted from seaweed, charred seashells and firewood, calamansi and white flowers, incense woods and uprooted mangroves that were collected from the village of Shek O on the southeastern coast of Hong Kong Island after the typhoon.
— Santa Monica fragrance designer Haley Alexander van Oosten's installation, "The Ripening of Mangosteen: A Scent Offering in Fragments", is part of the exhibition To See the Forests and the Trees, looking at the loss of trees in Hong Kong after Typhoon Mangkhut in September 2018. More information at the Asia Society Hong Kong Center.
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In a unique collaboration with London Philharmonic Orchestra as part of the Harrods Season, sound and scent come together this August for an immersive sensory experience. Join us as we explore olfactory notes to a musical soundtrack, hosted in Salon de Parfums from 7th to 31st August. Visit the space at any time to discover the experience or join us for a series of evening events, where the leading names in perfumery will showcase pieces of music alongside the exclusive fragrances that inspired them, delving deeper into the notes behind the scents. Evening events will take place from 5pm on Wednesday 7th, Thursday 8th and Friday 9th August.
— To book a spot for the evening Notes on Notes events at Harrods (you must rsvp by Friday), see the Harrods event page. Hat tip to David!
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Visitors move through Fructaplex©, a fruity, plasticky smell reminiscent of artificial car air-fresheners, to Sylvoxime©, which has a comforting sylvan note of a walk through the forest, before hitting the intense and complex smell called Hyperflor©, which Raspet describes as somewhere between fresh flower petals and putrid, overripe vegetation.
— Conceptual artist Sean Raspet of Detroit has an exhibit at Empty Gallery in Hong Kong; read more at Conceptual art goes molecular with works you can smell but can’t see, and one that ‘sees’ you at South China Morning Post.