“Once we stop seeing scent as decoration and start recognizing it as cultural information, it becomes a medium through which the world can be read and interpreted in entirely new ways,” the exhibition’s curator, Robert Müller-Grünow, told me in over email. He believes that, when using smell as a curatorial tool, “it becomes a way of thinking, because it opens up different pathways to understanding,” and, in doing so, “shifts visitors from passive looking to embodied understanding, often opening access to ideas that are difficult to express through text or image alone, as scents have immediate and purely emotional effects.”

— On the exhibit “The Secret Power of Scents” at Kunstpalast Düsseldorf. Read more in Is Smell the Next Big Thing in Art? at artnet.