About

Sissel Tolaas is a smell designer, artist, chemist, researcher, and odor theorist. With a multidisciplinary background in chemistry, linguistics, and the visual arts, Tolaas practices on the diverse aspects of the topic of scents. Here, she composes provocative smells to stimulate memory, recreate place, capture seasonality, and arouse emotional and intellectual responses. In 2004, she established the SMELL RE_searchLab. Situated in Berlin, the lab is part of the Tolaas studio, a workspace where interdisciplinary projects are developed, researched, and executed. In an attempt to categorically rewrite the vocabulary of olfaction, Tolaas has also developed a new “nose-language” called NASALO. Her research has received recognition such as an honorary mention in the Hybrid Art category of the 2010 Prix Ars Electronica and the Synthetic Biology and Synthetic Aesthetics Award from Stanford University, California and The University of Edinburgh, Edinbyrgh. Her most recent solo exhibition is RE______ at Astrup Fearny Museet, Oslo, 2021. She is based in Berlin.