Korean Pavilion to take visitors on ‘scent journey’ at Venice Biennale
Visitors going to the upcoming 60th edition of the Venice Biennale, the world’s longest-running and most prestigious survey of contemporary art, will get a chance to go on a scent odyssey to Korea inside a cylindrical steel building that houses the Korean Pavilion.
“Odorama Cities,” co-curated by Jacob Fabricius and Lee Seol-hui, is anchored in renowned artist Koo Jeong-a’s pieces that emit or visually reimagine aromas representing various scent memories associated with Korea — from the fragrant smell of apple blossoms in North Korea during the 1920s to the fishy odor of the Han River in the 1980s.
Koo has garnered acclaim for presenting site-specific works that reimagine architectural spaces, evoking subjective memories through intangible elements like scent, sound, and temperature.
For the project, the artist and exhibition team amassed a repository of over 600 memories from a diverse array of individuals during June to September of last year. This inclusive gathering encompassed ethnic Koreans worldwide, Korean adoptees, North Korean defectors, and foreigners who have journeyed to the country.
The team then collaborated with a local fragrance label, Nonfiction, to turn the private stories they gathered into 17 distinct smells, which will permeate the pavilion throughout the Biennale.
Koo and the two curators noted how they wanted to create a personalized and poetic portrait of Korea that transcends geographical boundaries through these olfactory elements during a press conference at the ARKO Art Center in central Seoul, Wednesday.
“Scent is a very powerful (form of) expression. It’s not visible with the eyes and it’s not something you listen to,” said Fabricius, the director of Art Hub Copenhagen who is also the first foreign curator appointed to lead the Korean Pavilion. “But it’s something that you can’t avoid, because you can’t avoid breathing the air that surrounds us.”
During the Biennale, the different aromas are set to interact with Koo’s physical installations inside the building — a lifesize bronze sculpture that functions as a gigantic scent diffuser, an infinity symbol engraved on the floor and two floating wooden pieces in the shape of a Möbius strip.
According to the Danish curator, the pavilion’s emphasis on scent, which travels without being constrained by boundaries or borders and freely encounters “strangers” anywhere, aligns with the theme of the Venice Biennale’s flagship International Art Exhibition, “Foreigners Everywhere.”
The Venice Biennale will return to Italy’s floating city on April 20 and run through Nov. 24. As in previous editions, this year’s biennial is twofold: the main International Art Exhibition, curated by Brazilian artistic director Adriano Pedrosa, and 90 national pavilion shows organized by their respective home countries.