Sissel Tolaas. RE_________.

Two letters and a blank

In autumn 2021 the Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo opened RE_________, a solo exhibition by Sissel Tolaas and the largest presentation of her work to date. Curated by Solveig Øvstebø, it spread across seven indoor and outdoor spaces.

Tolaas was born in Norway and lives in Berlin. For more than thirty years she has studied smell as a language, a form of data and an artistic material. Her work has been shown at the Venice Biennale, Tate Modern and MoMA in New York.

The title is incomplete. Two letters, then a row of underscores. According to the museum, the blank can open onto many words: remember, reveal, revive, regrowth, and more. The title is an unfinished sentence, and the visitor is invited to continue it.

An archaeology of the present

Tolaas calls the parts of the show situations, not works. Each situation is a smell, or a group of smells, found, reconstructed, classified and numbered. The pieces were made for the architecture of the venue, so each room lets smell appear in its own way.

The sources span nearly every continent and many social settings. Human skin. Money. Metals. Sweat. Fear. The ocean. Seeds. Melting ice. Read aloud, the list sounds more like an inventory than a palette. No smell was chosen because it was pleasant.

The museum described the approach as an olfactory archaeology of the present. Archaeology usually digs up what has passed. Tolaas digs up what is around us now and that nobody keeps: the smell of a street today, of a banknote in circulation, of ice before it is gone.

Fear on the list is not a metaphor. Tolaas has spent years working with the sweat of frightened people, as in the Fear series. In RE_________, fear sits beside seeds and seawater, one object in the archive among the rest.

The smell of 380,000 dollars

In September 2022 the exhibition travelled to the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, open from 16 September to 30 December. Zoë Ryan, the ICA's director, reconfigured it for that building. It was the first major show of Tolaas's work in the United States.

At the entrance, each visitor received a small vial. Inside was the smell of cash, specifically of 380,000 dollars, made by Tolaas for this presentation. Visitors carried it with them through the rooms.

The detail is funny and not funny. Money is the most abstract thing in daily life: a number, a promise, a line on a screen. Cash, though, smells. Paper, ink, metal, the sweat of the hands that counted it. Tolaas turns money back into matter and hands it to everyone alike.

Codes instead of labels

The familiar labels beside each work were absent. In their place were codes, set near each situation. Visitors had to smell first, guess first, and only later learn what they had smelled. In Philadelphia, the key to the codes waited in a final room on the second floor.

This reverses how museums usually work. We read the label, then we look. Words first, senses after. Tolaas makes the nose work alone, without words to lean on. Some guess right. Many guess wrong. Both are part of the work.

Reading the key, many people are surprised by the gap between what they sensed and what is written. That gap is the blank after RE. Smell always arrives before its name. Tolaas simply stretches that interval long enough for us to notice it.