Artist Anicka Yi Is Launching a Line of Perfumes That Blend Oils, Herbs—and Glandular Secretions

“In relation to fragrance, we have very stale and stagnant
narratives about what the feminine is,” says the artist Anicka Yi.
That’s why she’s teamed up with perfumer Barnabé Fillion and New
York’s Dover Street Market to release a new line of custom
fragrances that challenge preconceived notions of femininity and
attraction.

The line of three new perfumes is called Biography and each is
titled after a radical female figure. “Shigenobu Twilight —
Volume1” is inspired by Fusako Shigenobu, the leader of the
Japanese Red Army; “Radical Hopelessness — Volume2” signifies the
pharaoh Hatshepsut, one of the few—if not only—women to rise to
that position in ancient Egypt. The third, “Beyond Skin —
Volume3,” is an unnamed woman of the future.

“I was interested in these buried figures in history who were
forgotten because they refused to conform to societal limitations
about who they could be,” Yi told artnet News. “Hatshepsut is one
of the earliest figures who was recorded in public in drag. She had
to constantly be dressed as a man because her constituents wouldn’t
accept a female pharaoh. There was an erasure campaign to erase her
from the history!”

To capture the Egyptian ruler’s essence, Yi blended sandalwood
and patchouli, and incorporated notes of pink pepper, juniper, and
cardamom. For Shigenobu, who lived out her days in exile in
Lebanon, there is cedar, thyme, and frankincense, representing
that Middle Eastern country, and the scents of yuzu, shiso, and
black pepper, as a nod to her homesickness for Japan.

The third scent imagines an artificial intelligence drawn from
all women in history. The perfume includes suede, myrrh, and civet
musk, a glandular secretion from the small nocturnal mammal of the
same name.

“I imagined a beautiful grand algorithm that could somehow
connect every female story at once, both humans and other animals,
like the moray eel that starts as male and evolves into a female,
or a type of fungus that has 23,000 different sexes,” Yi said. “I
wanted a kind of intersection of different smells that came from
animals, humans, plants, and the microbial, as well as machines and
the industrial.”

Yi will launch the new perfume line at Dover Street with a
one-time, site-specific performance with Philadelphia’s Monell
Chemical Senses Center and its new olfactometer, a cutting-edge
smell synthesizer. “It’s a machine that can digitize smells.
Through a cell phone it’s able to conjure the smell of grass or
strawberries or hay, and other rudimentary smells, and release it
through the olfactometer,” said Yi. “I can only liken it to a DJ
who’s live-blending scents.”

The olfactory system appeals to Yi because it is so difficult to
understand. “So little is known about scent. It is one of the most
underrepresented senses, and in relation to art it’s a very
important way to bring together a lot of invisible non-ocular
elements,” said Yi. “Scent molecules exist in the air, the travel
through the air and into our bodies—this is how we receive smell.
Air is often overlooked and I consider it almost like a medium in
relationship to olfactive artworks”

Scent has long played a role in the artist’s practice. At the
entrance to Yi’s 2017 Hugo Boss Prize
show at the Guggenheim Museum, three canisters on the floor
diffused perfume throughout the gallery, spreading a
scent synthesized from the smells of “Asian women and
carpenter ants.” (The show featured a sculptural ant farm, with
living ants inside.)

There is no ant scent in the new line of perfumes, though the
artist suspended ladybugs, ants, and flies in the glass bottles.
The flies signify Hatshepsut’s use of them in them in her own
iconography, while the ants represent “an algorithmic
industriousness” and the ladybugs a certain playfulness.

“I hope that the smell is compelling and it awakens something in
people,” Yi said. “I want appeal to the curious, to those who want
to participate in this conversation around expanding the notion of
identity and gender.”

Anicka Yi’s perfume line, Biography, will debut with a
release party at Dover Street Market, 160 Lexington Ave, New York,
on November 21, 2019, at 6 p.m.

The post Artist Anicka Yi Is Launching a Line of Perfumes
That Blend Oils, Herbs—and Glandular Secretions appeared first
on artnet News.