4.–26.4.2026

The exhibition brings together new works, across film, sculpture and scent, exploring relationships between memory, landscape and emerging olfactory technologies.

At the centre of the exhibition is Prototype for Listening, a newly developed sculpture that gently diffuses an orchid scent into the gallery. Suspended from the ceiling, the work draws on the forms of greenhouse infrastructure and the delicate posture of drooping orchids, while its clear glass vessels and interconnected tubes reference the headspace technique used in the aroma industry.

Alongside the sculpture is the film Phantom Bloom, which speculates on disappearing aromatic landscapes from the perspective of a fictional “electronic nose” — a hybrid of a large language model and an analytical sensing instrument. The voice shifts between scientific language and lyrical poetry, forming an abstract audiovisual narrative between analysis and poetic recollection. Together, the works explore how aromatic landscapes might be captured, translated, or remembered through encounters between human and machine systems.

The body of work was developed between 2023 and 2025 during extended periods in Japan, where I researched contemporary aroma technologies alongside the traditions of incense and Kōdō. A central fascination was the idea of archiving aromas as a form of ‘listening’ — storing olfactory assets that may one day disappear. While in Tokyo, I collaborated with Takasago aroma labs, using Headspace technology to collect aroma molecules and develop a collection of orchid scents from species on the brink of extinction. The process deepened my understanding of how aromas can be captured, stored, and analysed, while raising questions about how disappearing scents might be accessed.

In parallel with my research into contemporary aroma capture, I learned about the Japanese tradition of Kōdō, an ancient practice centred on attentive listening to subtly scented agarwood. Through shared vocabularies, stories, and ritualised encounters, kōdō suggests that scent can be understood not only as a material substance but also through language and narrative. This led me to ask whether, in the absence of the scent itself, words might function as a form of code for remembering an olfactory landscape. In this sense, the exhibition attempts to hold aroma across multiple registers of language, from the scientific to the speculative, and from the material to the poetic.

The works in this exhibition have been supported by Kone Foundation, the Vilho & Olga Linnamo Foundation and Arts Promotion Centre Finland.

Aaro Murphy (1991, Jyväskylä) is a visual artist working between Amsterdam and Helsinki. Working across moving image, sound, and sculpture Murphy creates installations that question boundaries between the organic and synthetic – often exploring wider themes of the body and technology. Murphy’s work has previously been exhibited at Art Rotterdam, Osage Gallery Hong Kong, Bologna.cc, Kunsthalle Turku, Dalston Gallery Tokyo, SOLU and Oude Kerk Amsterdam.