Conversations in Contemporary Art presents SISSEL TOLAAS
Conversations in Contemporary Art, in collaboration with Hexagram-Concordia and Hexagram | CIAM, brings Norwegian scent artist Sissel Tolaas to Montreal in a lecture and panel discussion event.
Sissel Tolaas. Photo by Trevor Morgan
SMELL = information
- a tool for communication - navigation - education - decision making -
WHAT COULD HAPPEN WHEN INVISIBLE INFORMATION - SMELL MOLECULES - IS THE STARTING POINT OF ACTING, REACTING...COMMUNICATING?
Norwegian scent artist Sissel Tolaas, a professional 'InBetweener' questions what could happen when invisible information - such as smell molecules - is the starting point of acting, reacting and communicating.
Tolaas believes that smells are a very crucial component in the definition, understanding of and orientation to an environment. Smells surround us all the time. We breathe 23,040 times a day and move 12.5 cubic meters of air and with every breath smell molecules flood through our bodies. Even when we sleep we smell.
Historical, sociological and religious reasons have pulled the contemporary human being into almost ignoring more than 1 % of his genes, and only education can revive these hidden capacities, since the hardware and software still function in the healthy human being, but only if consciously trained and used.
There is a whole world to educate and a whole world to smell!
Tolaas's lecture will be immediately followed by a HEXA_OUT roundtable panel with four distinguished speakers from the Hexagram community, moderated by David Howes, Concordia professor of sociology and anthropology, examining the role of the senses in human and animal perception and cognition.
Sissel Tolaas was born Norway and is based in Berlin. She studied mathematics, linguistics, chemical science, languages, and visual art at Oslo, Warsaw, Moscow, St Petersburg and Oxford universities. Tolaas has been working actively in the area topic of Smell /Smell and Language Communications 1990, within different sciences, fields of art and design, and other disciplines. She established the SMELL RE_searchLab Berlin, on smell & communication / language, in Berlin in January 2004, supported by IFF (International Flavors & Fragrances Inc.)
Tolaas's research has won recognition through numerous national and international scholarships, honours, and prizes. She is a founding member of the International Sleep Science and Technology Association, China/US/Africa/Europe. Tolaas also recently founded the FUTURE OF EDUCATION, in collaboration with the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Future Education Platform Berlin.
Tolaas has done City SmellScape research in several cities such as Paris, Stockholm, Detroit, Kansas City, Berlin, Oslo and London, and is currently working on Nuuk, Istanbul, Calcutta, and Cape Town. She was recently commissioned, together with Harvard GSD, to develop new a Concept of Living in Kuwait.
Additional information
When: Thursday, January 30
Lecture 6:00 - 7:30 p.m.
Roundtable panel: 7:30 - 9:00 p.m.
Where: Visual Arts Building, Room 114, 1395 René Lévesque W.
Admission for all Conversations in Contemporary Art events is FREE and open to the general public.
Seating is first come, first serve. Doors open at 5:30 p.m.
The lecture and panel discussion will both be held in English.