agustine zegers. A toxin threatens, but it also beckons.

An exhibition to see and to smell

From 23 September to 13 December 2025, Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois Chicago showed A toxin threatens, but it also beckons. It was curated by Denny Mwaura and Lorelei Stewart.

The artist is agustine zegers, a Chilean artist based in Chicago, whose name is written in lower case. zegers makes olfactory art and also studies a field called atmospheric biopolitics, which can be understood as asking how the air around us is shaped by power, industry and decisions about who must breathe what.

The exhibition has two layers. One to see: polymer fragments, plastic puddles, found objects. One to smell: a scent made to recall the intense smell of oil extraction in a landscape.

Both layers speak of one material. Plastic, present everywhere in daily life, and almost no longer noticed.

The objects in the room

Inter.densidad, made in 2025, consists of polymer fragments containing microplastics. Poli.etilena, also 2025, is made from polyethylene, the most common plastic in bags, film and bottles.

On the gallery's windowpanes, zegers placed puddles of polymer with microplastics inside. Light passes through them as through thin skin, or an oil slick on water.

And there are found plastic bottle caps, filled with scent. Perhaps the most compact object in the show. Something we twist off and throw away each day becomes a small cup of smell. To know what it holds, the visitor must bend down and bring their nose close to a piece of rubbish.

The gesture is deliberately uncomfortable. We are used to seeing a bottle cap as unworthy of a look. Here it demands to be smelled.

Toxin and pleasure

The title holds a contradiction. A toxin is frightening. But plastic is also attractive: light, convenient, glossy, cheap. It makes life easier. We know it does harm, and we still reach for it.

zegers names that feeling precisely: desire and disgust before polymers at once. The show does not preach. It places the visitor exactly in the contradiction, where what threatens us and what comforts us are the same thing.

Smell makes the contradiction clearer than images do. A heavy smell of petroleum can make people wince, but it can also recall something familiar: a petrol station, fresh asphalt, traffic. We step back and realise we have lived with it for a long time.

A related theme appears in the work of Maki Ueda, who works with the smell that leads sea creatures to eat microplastics, in That Microplastics Smell Delicious!. Two artists, two methods, one question about what plastic leaves in the air and the water.

The porous body

A central idea of the show is the porosity of the body. Skin, lungs and blood are not walls. They absorb what the surroundings bring. Microplastics enter the body through food, water, air.

Gallery 400 describes the show as reflecting on the transcorporealities we share as inhabitants of Earth, in a time of ecological collapse. No one stands outside. What enters one body enters another, and animals, and soil.

Smell is the fitting way to say this. To smell something is to let part of an object enter you. Each breath is an absorption. zegers turns that ordinary act into something visitors must notice: what are we breathing in, and who decided it?