Never Fake It!
2025, (160 cm x 430 cm): textile, self recorded audio (read from a scientific report from 1972 by Charles E Colson “Olfactory Aversion Therapy for Homosexual Behavior”), poppers
This leather curtain diffuses the smell of poppers, an odored liquid often used in the gay community for sexual pleasure. The audio piece inside the curtain recounts a traumatic scientific history of odor-based gay aversion therapy using ammonia. The leather curtain, referring to gay club-culture, becomes a membrane where smells of sexual aversion become smells of sexual pleasure. The audience needs to come up close to the curtain to hear the audio piece at the same time being confronted with the smell of poppers. Smells regulate bodies, where poppers and ammonia become both antithetical and oddly similar simultaneously.