Illya Goldman Gubin + Sissel Tolaas
IGGSBT
OS.01
Art installation content
The project is a tribute to memory, challenging the dominance of visual stimuli in our world. While the image captures and forms a moment, smell brings it back to life in an instant and often visceral way.
INTERACTIVE EXPERIENCE: Visitors will interact with four rolls of nano-saturated paper composed of abstract fragrance molecules, each unique and stripped of their conventional function, becoming landscapes of possibility, shaped not by pre-existing narratives, but by the individual’s own experience of time, place, and emotion. These fragments of paper, preserved in laboratory-grade aluminium bottles, will become capsules of personal memory, accessible only through the recollection of the experience lived whilst traversing the exhibition. Unlike a framed image or concrete idea, paper in this form resists fixed meaning. What is typically weightless now carries a profound gravity.
SMELL AS A CREATIVE MATERIAL: Illya Goldman Gubin’s material exploration and Sissel Tolaas’s olfactory intervention do not exist separately; The use of paper in place of bottles transforms fragrance into an active and participatory experience, encouraging visitors to physically engage with the scent, and trigger their own new memory. The creators allow the viewer to confront the material directly, offering a distilled moment where paper is no longer a mere background element, but rather a subject to be experienced in it’s own right. Here, paper is no longer just paper, and scent is no longer just scent. Together, they create an ephemeral, lived experience - one that unfolds in the present and lingers in memory.