Ten Encounters opened on October 9, 2021 at Olfactory Art Keller, Andreas Keller’s gallery devoted to olfactory art in New York.
The exhibition was curated by Saskia Wilson-Brown, and was subsequently also exhibited at the Institute for Art and Olfaction in Los Angeles.
About Ten Encounters
'Ten Encounters' explores meetings between two individuals that had repercussions that shape culture to this day.
Ten artists from around the world were invited to imagine important meetings - some historical, some mythological - through an olfactory environment. The artists' scented interpretations allowed exhibition visitors to participate in these important moments of human confluence.
Artists:
Adedognin Abimbola (Nigeria)
Algorithmic Perfumery (Netherlands)
Dana El Masri (Canada)
Lakenda Wallace (United States)
Lula Curioca (Mexico)
Maki Ueda (Japan)
Niamh O'Connell (Ireland)
Ömer İpekçi (Turkey)
Spyros Drosopoulos (Greece | Netherlands}
Zhi'ang Chen (Singapore)
Statement by Andreas Keller
The art of scent creating is an additive process. One scent is added to another. Once a scent is added, it can't be removed. If the result is not what the artist has hoped for, the mixture has to be discarded and the artists starts over. There are no scientific principles that govern what happens when a smell is added to another. Painters have color theory to guide them when mixing colors, but scent creators do not have a "smell theory", they use their intuitions and experiences and go through round after round of trial and error.
In most cases, mixing two smells results in a smell that is somewhere in between the two components or a simple combination of them. However, sometimes scent creators discover that from the mixture of two odors an entirely new odor gestalt emerges. A similar pattern is found when two humans meet. Most encounters leave no trace, some make a person's day slightly better or worse, but very few have repercussions that shape culture for centuries or even millennia.
For Ten Encounters , Saskia Wilson-Brown of the Institute for Art and Olfaction invited ten artists from around the world to explore encounters between two individuals that shaped culture to this day. The exhibiting artists created olfactory interpretations of the meeting of a snake queen and a wood seller, artificial intelligence and the last human on earth, a Dutch trader and a Japanese shogun, and seven other consequential encounters. Using their sense of smell, visitors to the gallery can participate in these important moments of human confluence.
The Encounters
Oshun and Ogun
Ahmosi and Amun
Ahmosi and Amun
Location: Nigeria + Benin
3rd millenia BC
by Lakenda Wallace
When the Yoruba god of iron Ogún became disgusted with humanity and ran away to the forest, none of the other gods could persuade him to rejoin the world. Without him, all production halted, and humans and Orishas alike began to starve. Oshún decided to step in. She entered the forest dancing with scarves, revealing and hiding her body. When Ogún approached, she smeared his lips with honey. Oshún’s sweetness tempted him out of the forest, and Ogún returned to the city.
Ahmosi and Amun
Ahmosi and Amun
Ahmosi and Amun
Location: Memphis, Egypt
1507 BC
by Dana El Masri
One evening, Ahmosi was visited by the god Amun, who made himself recognizable by his godly aroma. Upon waking, Ahmosi recognized the God. As the story goes, “his love passed into her limbs, which the fragrance of the god flooded; all his odors were from Punt.” The result of this olfactory union was the conception of the second female Pharaoh, Hatshepsut.
Theseus and the Minotaur
Theseus and the Minotaur
Theseus and the Minotaur
Location: Crete, Minoas
Prior to 6th C BCE
by Spyros Drosopoulos
Theseus’ defeat of the minotaur in the labyrinth at Crete was a central story in Greek mythology. The myth details the heroic journey of Theseus, in opposition to the animalic desperation of the minotaur, trapped in his underground labyrinth.
Shahmaran and Camasb
Theseus and the Minotaur
Theseus and the Minotaur
Location: Tarsus Province, Turkey
Time unknown
by Ömer İpekçi
After stumbling on a honey filled cave, Camasb, a poor woodseller, followed its source to discover a secret garden with flowers he had never seen before. This is the realm of the snakes, ruled by the snake queen Shahmaran. Bewitched by the beauty of the garden and the queen, he lived there in peace for a time until – missing his family – he asked to leave. Shahmaran granted him his freedom on condition that he tell no one about their world. However, when the king got sick, and at the vizier’s urging, Camasb told of her location, and she was killed. Her corpse, as an ingredient, has three different qualities. Life, death and wisdom.
Tristan and Iseult
Admiral Zheng He and the Sultan of Malacca
Admiral Zheng He and the Sultan of Malacca
Location: Ireland and Cornwall
12th C CE
by Niamh O’Connell
Cornish knight Tristan is sent by King Mark to retrieve Irish princess Iseult. On the way home, the two inadvertently consume a love potion, causing them to fall irretrievably in love with one another. Although Iseult marries King Mark, they cannot stop themselves from continuing their adulterous relationship. King Mark, learning of the affair, lays a trap to discover them. When he does, he sentences Iseult to burning and Tristan to the gallows. In some versions of the story, they survive. In most, they do not.
Admiral Zheng He and the Sultan of Malacca
Admiral Zheng He and the Sultan of Malacca
Admiral Zheng He and the Sultan of Malacca
Location: Malacca (Malaysia)
1405 CE
by Zhi’ang Chen
In the early 15th century, the Emperor of China appointed Admiral Zheng He as an envoy, commanding a majestic fleet of trade ships, to make contact with and establish trade relationships with various kingdoms from South Asia all the way to Africa. In particular, the fleet’s sojourn in the Sultanate of Malacca, an integral part of the Spice Routes, marked the first encounter between Chinese and Malayan heritages. Their confluence eventually produced the rich interwoven tapestry that is the unique Peranakan/Nonya culture, whose influence can be felt in Southeast Asia, including in Singapore, to this day.
Tokugawa Tsunayoshi and Engelbert Kaempfer
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Viceroy Lysi
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Viceroy Lysi
Location: Edo, Japan
1691 CE
by Maki Ueda
Tokugawa Tsunayoshi was one of the shoguns of the Edo period in Japan, and Engelbert Kaempfer stayed in Dejima (Nagasaki) for about two years as a German doctor of the Dutch trading post. During the period of national isolation, the Netherlands was Japan’s only trading partner. The Dutch East India Company brought textiles and fragrance materials from Batavia to Nagasaki. The fragrance materials include agarwood, natural borneol, and cloves: mostly meant for incense. In order to present these goods, Kaempfer met the shogun Tsunayoshi in Edo twice, in 1691 and 1692.
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Viceroy Lysi
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Viceroy Lysi
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Viceroy Lysi
Location: Mexico City
1680 CE
by Lula Curioca
The 17th century nun and poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz was a forerunner of feminism in Mexico. She dedicated herself to religious life not by divine vocation, but to cover her intellectual need for knowledge. When Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz met the Spanish vicereine of Mexico María Luisa Manrique de Lara y Gonzaga – or Lysi, as she called her – she became her patron and they fell in love. Their mutual devotion was embodied in Mexican literature; intermingling in the texts the life of the convent and palace festivities, which led to the development of a literary body of work of inescapable historical importance in Hispanic and world literature.
Fela Kuti and the unknown soldier
Fela Kuti and the unknown soldier
Fela Kuti and the unknown soldier
Location: Lagos, Nigeria
1977 CE
by Adedognin Abimbola and Saskia Wilson-Brown, with thanks to Anahita Mekanik
In 1977, Fela Kuti and Africa 70 released the album Zombie, which heavily criticized Nigerian soldiers. The album infuriated the government, who raided Kuti’s commune – known as Kalakuta Republic – with 1,000 soldiers. During the raid, Kuti was severely beaten, and his elderly mother was fatally injured after being thrown from a top story window. The commune itself was burnt down. The Nigerian government launched a official inquiry into the incident, concluding that the commune had been lit on fire by an “unknown soldier”. As a tribute to his mother, Fela Kuti recorded an album of that name in 1979, released in 1981.
The Last Human on Earth and an AI
Fela Kuti and the unknown soldier
Fela Kuti and the unknown soldier
Location: Earth
The future
by Algorithmic Perfumery
It’s the end of the human inhabitation of Earth, and all humans have left the planet, except one. This scent tracks the encounter between the last human, and the AI that humanity left behind.