Close your eyes and imagine a tarred street in the summer heat, flowering lilac or a recently polished floor. What is that you're smelling?
When we describe smells we are attempting to put a sensory impression into words, to use language to give objectivity to a subjective perception. The Norwegian artist Sissel Tolaas addresses such sensory experiences in her work, examining immaterial aspects of our environment that we apprehend not via our eyes or ears but subliminally via the nose. Tolaas has amassed an extensive archive of smells from around the world. In addition to documenting her experiences in this way, she wishes to increase awareness of the perceptual acts involved and to give them verbal form. Perhaps more than with other sensory impressions, attempts to describe smells inevitably find us incapable of reproducing precisely in words the nuances of a specific olfactory experience. This makes it all the more important that we record the associations and memories awakened by smells.
In like it/like it not/like it... Tolaas shows that how we perceive things via our senses is influenced not only by personal experience, but also by our cultural background, and that such sensory impressions can help establish a sense of identity. The artist uses the medium of smell in an unusual way: simply by pressing a button, we will become acquainted with Messestadt and its residents.

Tolaas began by analysing smells in Messestadt in collaboration with a perfume expert. From these smells they created a perfume embodying the character of the suburb in olfactory terms. In the second phase of her project the artist asked some Messestadt residents to describe this professionally manufactured perfume in their mother tongue. People from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds live in the new suburb and, in describing the perfume, they used metaphors and notions specific to their various origins. In the Western world smelling and smells are usually spoken of indirectly, in terms of something else. There is a marked discrepancy between the diversity of what our noses perceive and the limited verbal means at out disposal. Other cultures - those of Africa, for instance - offer more extensive linguistic possibilities for describing smells. Tolaas used the recorded descriptions to form slogans from which she will invent a name for her Messestadt perfume.
Eventually, Tolaas will set up three machines in Messestadt, on the Promenade, in an underground car park and in front of the main entrance to the trade fair grounds. By pressing a button on these narrow steel columns, passers-by will activate an electronic circuit that releases the Messestadt perfume through a series of small holes and lets them hear both the artist's slogans and the residents' descriptions.
Come to Messestadt, close your eyes, and smell. Local residents will help you find suitable words, familiar or unfamiliar, to describe your impressions.

Summer 2003