KUNSTHAL CHARLOTTENBORG APRIL 21 – MAY 23
TEXT FROM CATALOGUE:
Three wooden boxes appear throughout the exhibition space. Simple in their construction similar to the scale of humans, they ask viewers to walk up close and attune themselves and their bodies to senses other than the visual, — scent, humidity, texture and scale. Wood, even as it is cut down and transformed, remains a porous breathing material expanding and shrinking depending on the humidity of its surroundings. As such these boxes register our presence and consume the humidity of our bodies and breath.
A small sliver appears down the side of each box inviting us to peek in. What is inside the hollowed out spaces of these containers, remains uncertain. Our visual perception cannot get a clear view, yet other senses are at play. Each box has been infused with a smell, forcing us to breathe in — at once with each breath bringing the art and its surroundings inside our bodies and out again. This might disturb our traditional distinctions between environment and body, the self and the other, nature and culture, in a continuous reciprocal loop becoming one.
Art is a container and a space for thinking otherwise and with. In this sense scent lies in that quiet, immaterial zone of the non-verbal, the non-visual and the nonsensical. In a time of constant definition and categorization, the pure ambiguity and boundless quality scent inhabits, seem uncanny. Can this smelly presence rinse our senses towards other ways of belongings and feeling kinship for nature’s bodily funk in an age of alienation?
PHOTOS: DAVID STJERNHOLM
INFUSED WOOD, CARBON BLACK
INFUSED WOOD, CARBON BLACK
INFUSED WOOD, CARBON BLACK
Sophie Filtenborg 