Stefani Glauber
≈350
09.05. – 27.06.2021

A person has around 350 different olfactory receptors with which they move through everyday life. In her exhibition ≈350, Stefani Glauber (born 1991) takes a fragmentary look at the analysis of this perception and the digitalization of smell. The idea and attempts to use, control and digitize smell have a long and varied history:

In the Roman Colosseum, tubes were installed through which saffron and herbal scents soaked in wine were evaporated to cover up the smell of blood in the arena on hot days. Around 2000 years later, Kurd Laßwitz described an olfactory piano in his utopian tale “To the Zero Point of Being”. This piano was played in the so-called “Odoratorium”, a “place for public olfactory performances” that had “joined the concert hall and theater as an indispensable place of recreation”. In addition to hearing and seeing, smelling was thematized here as a sensory perception with equal status and performed independently.

And just as with hearing or seeing, the perception of smells is not without socio-cultural attributions. How a person perceives other people and describes their smell is not free from the lines of evaluation, for example along the lines of age, class or ascribed gender, which also classify a society in other ways. In contrast to the visual, however, this happens more unnoticed. In everyday German, there are no adjectives to describe smells and the taboo does the rest. Stefani Glauber approaches these aspects with a large-format, collage-like work on paper.

Another work deals directly with the smell of the Kunsthalle, an audio guide that takes you through the exhibition and focuses on something that cannot be seen: the analysis and thus the history of the odor molecules in the air at the Kunstverein Bremerhaven.

The change in the smell of the air caused by visitors also becomes part of the exhibition material: an odor sensor in the room detects the air. The output is displayed on a website so that it can be observed from outside whether a person is in the exhibition space or not.

While artistic works with mirrors or, since the 1990s, with video cameras that allow visitors to see themselves in the exhibition have become an integral part of contemporary art, Stefani Glauber applies this self-reflection to the field of smell.

Curated by Dr. Kai Kähler.

www.ungefeahr350.de

≈350 is an exhibition as part of the state exhibition project “Smell it!” on smell in contemporary art and was curated by Dr. Kai Kähler.

www.smellit.eu@smellit #smellit #smellinart