Sissel Tolaas

Norwegian-born artist and smell researcher Sissel Tolaas will present her first major project in Finland. Centred on a large-scale exhibition at the Lahti Museum of Visual Arts Malva, the project reimagines the museum as a living organism in which bodies, architecture, atmosphere, and environment continuously affect one another

Rather than privileging vision—the sense that continues to dominate contemporary culture—Tolaas creates a sensory and embodied experience. The exhibition approaches emotional intelligence (EI) not simply as an individual psychological skill, but as a shared condition shaped by air, temperature, smell, proximity, movement, and the presence of other bodies.

The project connects the original function of Malva’s building as a brewery and sauna culture, exploring fermentation and sweating as parallel biological processes. It also honours architect Juhani Pallasmaa’s legacy by extending his vision of architecture as a sensory continuation of the human body.

For more than three decades, Tolaas has radically expanded the role of smell within contemporary art, culture and science. Her work demonstrates that smell is neither secondary nor merely decorative, but a precise instrument of knowledge: a form of communication, an archive of lived experience, an indicator of environmental change, and a powerful carrier of cultural memory.

Tolaas’s work has been presented by major institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Serpentine Gallery in London, and Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. She has also participated in landmark international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale and documenta 13.

The project is developed collaboratively with EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art. Malva serves as its primary epicentre, hosting Tolaas’s large-scale solo exhibition, while a related spatial intervention at EMMA translates and transforms elements of the project within a different architectural and institutional context. Together, the two museums form an interconnected sensory system extending across two locations and two cites.