While combing the web in recent months, looking for interesting articles to share with our Museum 411 subscribers, we began to notice a new crop of exhibitions using scent in creative ways. And though using smells in exhibitions isn’t a new concept, it continues to feel novel and exciting, particularly for visitors.
Let’s take a look at recent ways museums have incorporated olfactory sensory experiences into exhibitions plus how to go about using scent in a museum project of your own.
Fleeting – Scents in Color
This exhibition at the Mauritshuis explored the portrayal of scent and smell in 17th-century art, giving visitors an opportunity to experience the scents of the past and enhancing the visuals of the paintings.
In some 17th-century artworks the suggestion of smell is so strong that you can almost imagine yourself in the moment. Do you experience a painting differently if you can also literally smell the work as you look at it? (Source: Fleeting – Scents in Colour at the Mauritshuis)
The museum worked with perfumers to create eight smells to pair with paintings on display. Due to the timing of this exhibition (COVID), the museum also made scent boxes available for purchase so visitors could enjoy a virtual tour from home.
In order for scents not to mix or overwhelm the gallery, a dry dispensation method was used; visitors could operate a foot pedal to release a few molecules of scent — from spices in a grocery to the stink of the canals — into their immediate personal space.
Learn more about the behind-the-scenes development here: Fragrant Moments in Time: Smelling the Past in the Hague.
The Essence of a Painting. An Olfactory Exhibition
Similarly, the Prado developed ten fragrances associated with elements in the Rubens and Bruegel painting The Sense of Smell. The olfactory project was a collaboration between Samsung, the Perfume Academy Foundation, and Puig (using Puig’s AirParfum technology). Through diffusers installed in interactive touchscreens, visitors could smell 17th-century elements present in the paintings, from the perfumed leather gloves to the variety of flora depicted in the scene.
Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites
This fall, the Barber Institute of Fine Arts will explore scent as a key motif in paintings by the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic movements. Visitors to the exhibition will be able to participate in an optional scent experience — triggered by pressing a button on a nearby diffuser — to enliven scents suggested in the paintings, like burning incense or a rain-soaked English countryside. Additional activities and events exploring art and scent will accompany the exhibition.
Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion
The recently concluded exhibition at the Met took a slightly different approach, using forensic chemistry to collect and reproduce smell molecules, allowing visitors to smell the garments on display. Scent artist and researcher Sissel Tolaas teamed up with Symrise to create the smells, which visitors could experience in a multitude of ways: sniffing acrylic tubes next to the garments, lifting stoppers from glass vials, and a scratch-and-sniff wall.
“I’m trying to add narrative to this garment worn by people,” [Tolaas] said. “This garment is a legacy of time. Patina is part of history. Don’t clean everything up. We live in this world where B.O. is a no-go. By covering it and sanitizing everything away, we completely misunderstand everything.” (Source: The Invisible World of ‘Smell Artist’ Sissel Tolaas, Artnet)
For an in depth look at how the scents were captured and recreated, check out How the Met’s Sleeping Beauties Exhibition Was Given an Olfactory Edge.
Perlan Museum
The popular nature exploratorium in Reykjavík allows visitors to experience the historic 2021 Geldingadalir eruption, the first eruption in the area in more than 800 years. During an 8-minute volcano film, a lava-like scent developed by Fischersund is piped into the theater. The smoke-tar-grass-anise mixture is so memorable and alluring that visitors are drawn to purchase bottled versions, called No. 23, in the gift shop.
Aquarium of the Pacific
Also in the Smell-O-Vision category, the Long Beach aquarium worked with SensoryCo. to create a multi-sensory 4D theater experience in its recently remodeled Pacific Visions Theater. While watching a free, 8-minute film on the floor-to-ceiling screen, viewers smell the ocean when marine life appears or catch a whiff of freshly cut grass as the camera pans over green farmland.
For a deeper dive into the history of, problems with, and successful use of atmospheric scent in theaters, take a look at this academic article on Scent in Cinema. You might also explore the San Francisco Symphony’s recent foray into synesthesia effects in a theater full of people: Fragrance-Enhanced San Francisco Symphony Performance Has the Whiff of Something Interesting.
Tall Ship Glenlee
In 2022, the Tall Ship Glenlee, a 127-year-old former merchant sailing vessel docked near the Riverside Museum in Glasgow, secured funding for new sensory experiences:
Alongside three soundscapes, the team identified seven areas where scents could enrich the experience, bringing the past to life in a visceral and personal way. For this, they worked with museum smell experts AromaPrime, who provided a range of samples based on the ship’s stories.
The seven final scents include old-fashioned soap in the captain’s bathroom, tobacco and alcohol in the captain’s saloon, putrid dirty linen in the deckhouse, oil and smoke in the engine room, potatoes in the galley and antiseptic fluids in the hospital. (Source: Glasgow Ship Museum Unveils New ‘Unique’ Smell System, The Herald)
Visitors can trigger a scent to fill the room by pressing a brass doorbell integrated into an information panel. In consideration of sustainability and visitor sensitivities, the buttons are designed to only release scent every 20 minutes. Because this is a new endeavor and a newly developed system, the museum team continues to monitor and tweak the way scents fill the spaces to maximize the visitor experience.
Using Scents in Your Museum
Scent is a powerful force. It has strong links to emotion and memory, making it ripe for inclusion in a multi-sensory museum experience. But only recently have we begun to see best practices for incorporating olfactory experiences in museums. Indeed, as noted in How Can Scents Enhance the Impact of Guided Museum Tours? Towards an Impact Approach for Olfactory Museology in 2021:
The development of the scents for the exhibitions is hardly ever described in detail, nor are the scents stored for future reference. This is also true for the techniques used for the distribution of the scents, and for their effectiveness. Through this lack of documentation, curators, tour guides and technical staff often have to improvise on how to work with scents in a heritage context.
In efforts to contribute to future olfactory projects in museums, the article in question tackles a few of the big unknowns:
We describe 1) the creation of historically informed and artistic scents to accompany works of art, 2) the experimentation with different methods for olfactory storytelling and smell distribution techniques, 3) the development of a methodology for impact measurement (through questionnaires, interviews and observation), and 4) the outcomes of the impact analysis, also taking into account the advantages of olfactory storytelling for people of different abilities, in this case blind people and people with low vision.
Another excellent — and free — resource published November 2023 is the Olfactory Storytelling Toolkit: A “How-To” Guide for Working with Smells in GLAMs and Heritage Institutions. In it you’ll find practical methods you can use to bring smells into the museum, how to develop and document the process, and more.
Further related reads and exploration of scent in exhibitions:
The Smell of Success: How Scent Became the Must-Have Interpretative Tool
Profile of the Aftel Archive of Curious Scents
AAM Open Forum Discussion: Featuring Smells in an Exhibition
