holo- (Kamila Valešová & Michaela Cagáňová) & Elektra Stampoulou
PARADISE ROT
Exhibition opening: 24. 4. 2025 / 19.00 hod. Exhibition's duration: 25. 4. - 31. 5. 2025 Exhibition's curator: Petra Housková
What would we discover if we perceived the world primarily through smell rather than sight? What unknown stories could scents and odours tell us?
“Paradise Rot” explores smell as a neglected sensory perception and simultaneously as a powerful epistemological tool. Scent – ephemeral yet visceral – communicates directly with our emotions and memories, bypassing intellectual processing. Unlike visual or textual information, olfactory experiences defy documentation and classification, existing only as fleeting moments of encounter.
The paradoxical title of the exhibition is borrowed from Jenny Hval’s novel, a book that holo- found in Elektra’s library the first time they worked together in Athens nearly a year ago, and a book that oddly frames their practice. It deliberately confronts paradise (associated with perfection, beauty, and permanence) with rot (decomposition and transience). This provocative juxtaposition challenges traditional binary thinking that positions growth and decay in opposition. Instead, “Paradise Rot” presents these processes as interconnected phases in endless cycles, where destruction enables growth and the repulsive gradually transforms into the attractive. Each transformation – from birth to decomposition – creates characteristic olfactory signatures that mark temporal processes and connect us to an archetypal understanding of the world.
Smell serves as a conceptual thread connecting the work of the artistic duo holo- (Michaela Cagáňová and Kamila Valešová) and visual artist Elektra Stampoulou. However, they approach the theme through different methodological and aesthetic approaches. Their shared exploration of scent as a narrative medium overcomes visual dominance and invites visitors to experience art through a sense that is often overlooked in contemporary artistic practice.
Elektra Stampoulou brings a distinctive human dimension and refined playfulness to her sculptural and olfactory works. Moving between diverse narratives, blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality, she captures the ephemerality of scents that permeate and surround everything visual, spatial, or material. With an emphasis on playfulness, she invites us to blow fragrant bubbles, which, upon bursting, bring pleasant yet disturbing associations. Various scented objects seem familiar but unreliable, delicate, and subtly dangerous. Are we witnessing the end of the world, living between these traces – fragments, remains, and scents? Are these fleeting perceptions enough to re-enchant us?
holo-‘s immersive installation oscillates around ritual objects transformed by contemporary materials and processes. Their altar wall depicting insect metamorphosis, together with a series of five scent compositions, captures the world’s life cycle in five stages – from the emergence of the first organism to the planet’s demise. If prehistoric stages of the world had preserved their scents, what would they smell like? Holo attempts to reconstruct these narratives through their scent fossils, capturing the world’s life cycle in five stages – from the emergence of the first organism to the extinction of the planet. A complete cycle that can repeat again and again. Through motifs of microorganisms and developmental stages of insects, holo- proposes forms of spirituality and communication that transcend the human dimension, suggesting that other species may experience transcendence primarily through chemical signals rather than visual symbols.
The exhibition “Paradise Rot” invites us to question the dominance of the visual and open ourselves to the intimate, transformative possibilities of smell. In a time of ecological transformations, an urgent question arises: Which olfactory traces will survive the collapse of current structures? Can these fleeting yet deeply rooted sensory perceptions help us rediscover our forgotten connections with other life forms and understand the cyclical nature of all existence?
The program of the gallery is supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council. The Slovak Arts Council is the main partner of the project.
