On 21 September 2022, I presented the talk “Curating Multisensory and Food-Based Art” at the Museum & Galleries of NSW’s event, SPARK: Museums. Ideas. Connections., at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
This talk surveys curatorial projects staging multisensory encounters where audiences see, hear, feel, smell, and sometimes taste the artworks on show. It will also touch on logistical challenges connected to exhibiting ephemeral, intangible, and edible materials. Key projects include Sugar, Sugar (2013), an exhibition featuring ten female artists using sugar as the primary material in immersive and interactive artworks, and reminiSCENT (2018), an exhibition of olfactory artworks exploring the relationship between scent and memory. These projects consider how food-based art invites subjects to contribute their own memories, associations, and appetites to their embodied experience of the sensorial pleasures or displeasures aroused by the artwork.