Scent Fair Austin: Elemental
Curated by Carlos Moreno of Barrio Pop Studio
Sunday, November 2, 2025
Future Front House, Austin, Texas
Public Hours: 11 AM – 5 PM
Scent Fair Austin debuts its exhibition program with Elemental, an immersive exploration of scent, materiality, ritual, and the elemental forces that shape artistic and spiritual life.
Guided by Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, the exhibition invites reflection on memory, identity, ancestral connection, and the sensory dimensions of contemporary art. Coinciding with Día de los Muertos, Elemental honors traditions of remembrance and offering through works that engage scent as both material and memory.
Through installation, performance, film, incense, botanicals, writing, and guided interpretation, the exhibition considers how scent moves through the body as archive, atmosphere, and trace.
Scent Fair Austin: Elemental is supported in part by the City of Austin Office of Arts, Culture, Music, and Entertainment through the Nexus Award.
Curatorial Statement
Elemental begins with the understanding that scent is deeply attached to memory, geography, labor, family, ritual, grief, celebration, and return. A smell can collapse time. It can place the body back inside a kitchen, a garden, a shoreline, a childhood home, a sacred space, or a landscape that no longer exists in the same way.
The exhibition is shaped by the elemental language of earth, air, fire, and water, and by the ways these forces appear across artistic, spiritual, and cultural life. In this context, scent becomes a material of remembrance. It moves through the air, clings to the body, rises through smoke, gathers in flowers and plants, and returns through ritual.
Presented in alignment with Día de los Muertos, the exhibition honors practices of offering, grief, devotion, and ancestral connection. It asks how memory is carried not only through images and objects, but through atmosphere, gesture, ritual, and the body’s own archive.
Ana Mendieta as Conceptual Framework
Ana Mendieta’s practice serves as a conceptual anchor for Elemental.
Her earth-body works considered the relationship between the human form and the natural world through performance, ritual, and material intervention. Often working with elemental substances such as soil, fire, water, flowers, and smoke, Mendieta created temporary gestures that held the tension between visibility and disappearance.
Her work offers a powerful way to think about scent: as something ephemeral but not absent, invisible but not immaterial. Scent, like Mendieta’s traces, exists through encounter. It is experienced through proximity, memory, and the body.
Elemental extends this inquiry by asking how scent can operate as an artistic material and curatorial structure. Within the exhibition, fragrance becomes a way to think through memory, ritual, cultural inheritance, and the sensory conditions of belonging.
Featured Artists & Public Programs
Nam Joti Kaur Khalsa
Sophia: A Tribute to Grief
Nam Joti Kaur Khalsa presents Sophia, a life-sized grief doll that exists between this world and the Otherworld.
Hand-woven from plant-dyed corn husks and dried botanicals, Sophia embodies remembrance, devotion, and the thin veil between ourselves and our ancestors. The work invites reflection on grief, love, and care, offering access to the aroma of memory as visitors encounter the coexistence of loss and devotion.
Through material, scent, and spiritual presence, Sophia becomes an offering — a form that holds grief not as absence, but as continued relationship.
Paloma Mayorga
haciendo y deshaciendo / doing and undoing
Paloma Mayorga’s interdisciplinary practice merges photography, performance, installation, and painting to explore ancestral plant knowledge, ecological memory, and embodied transformation.
For Elemental, Mayorga presents herb-filled cocoons that engage the senses and invite visitors to breathe, remember, and release. The installation reflects on interconnection, ritual, and the sensory dimensions of the natural world.
Through making and unmaking, holding and releasing, Mayorga’s work offers a meditation on care, transformation, and the plant knowledge carried across generations.
Hannah Jackson
Scents of Memory: An Invitation to Feel
Hannah Jackson of Acquired Taste leads Scents of Memory, an olfactory activation combining an incense bar with a creative writing workshop.
Her practice transforms incense burning into a meditative ritual, evoking memory and reflection while inviting participants into scent-driven storytelling. Through fragrance, intention, and language, the experience creates space for personal reflection and emotional release.
Scents of Memory bridges sensory experience and writing, inviting visitors to consider how memory rises, lingers, and transforms through scent.
Dr. Nirupama Kumar
Olfaction, Synesthesia, and Contemporary Art
Dr. Nirupama Kumar of Equity Through Art guides interactive gallery walkthroughs exploring how scent shapes perception, memory, and meaning.
Drawing from her interdisciplinary background in neuroscience, art, and education, Dr. Kumar invites participants to engage both sight and scent as connected pathways of interpretation. Her walkthroughs encourage visitors to consider how sensory experience deepens our relationship to contemporary art.
Through olfaction, synesthesia, and embodied reflection, these guided experiences foster personal insight and collective connection.
Film Screening
The exhibition includes a short film by Jessie Rodriguez, expanding the sensory and conceptual world of Elemental through moving image.
The film functions as an atmospheric extension of the exhibition, creating another space to consider the relationship between body, land, memory, and transformation. Through image, rhythm, and sound, the film deepens the exhibition’s engagement with sensory experience beyond the visual field.
About Scent Fair Austin
Scent Fair Austin was created to expand the possibilities of scent within contemporary art and community-based practice.
Presented by Barrio Pop Studio, the project supports artists, cultural workers, and creative practitioners exploring fragrance, ritual, material culture, and sensory experience. Scent Fair Austin positions scent as a curatorial tool that can open new ways of thinking about memory, identity, place, and belonging.
Through exhibition, public programming, and artist collaboration, Scent Fair Austin creates space for olfactory experience to be treated as serious, poetic, and culturally significant.
Event Details
Scent Fair Austin: Elemental
Date: Sunday, November 2, 2025
Public Hours: 11:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Location: Future Front House, Austin, Texas
Curated by: Barrio Pop Studio
Future Front House is a dynamic arts and culture venue in Austin dedicated to experimental exhibitions, immersive experiences, and community engagement. Its spaces invite multisensory exploration, making it an ideal setting for the debut of Scent Fair Austin.
