Sissel Tolaas

Sissel Tolaas (b. 1961, Norway) is an artist and researcher who has made smell her primary medium. Working from a background in chemistry, mathematics, linguistics, and visual art — studied across universities in Oslo, Warsaw, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Oxford — she treats odor not as something to be perfumed away but as a dense form of information about places, bodies, and emotions. Since 1990 she has built a practice that sits between contemporary art and science, and that has done much to establish scent as a serious material for artistic and intellectual inquiry rather than a marginal or merely decorative one.

Tolaas's method begins with collection. Using head-space technology to capture and chemically reconstruct real-world smells, she has assembled an archive that has grown from roughly 7,000 sealed jars to more than 15,000 recorded and reproduced odors. A parallel concern is language: convinced that the West has become smell-blind, she develops vocabularies and notation to describe what is usually left unspoken. Her City SmellScape projects — more than fifty since 1998, in Paris, Berlin, Mexico City, Kansas City, and elsewhere — map urban life through its odors, often surfacing neighborhoods and realities that sight overlooks. Other works press at the boundary of the acceptable: The FEAR of smell — the smell of FEAR (MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2006) reconstructed the sweat of twenty-one men with severe phobias and embedded it, through microencapsulation, in gallery walls that released the scent at a touch; with the microbiologist Christina Agapakis she later cultured cheeses from human bacteria. For Tolaas, relearning to smell is finally an ethical and political act — a training in tolerance and attention to invisible information.

In 2004 she founded the SMELL RE_searchLab in Berlin, supported by International Flavors & Fragrances, where her interdisciplinary projects continue. Her work has been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou, Hamburger Bahnhof, and the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, among others, and recognized with the Ars Electronica Award and honors connected to Harvard and Stanford. By insisting that the most overlooked of the senses carries knowledge worth taking seriously, Tolaas has opened a field that few artists had treated as one at all.