Vedat Ozan:
Are Science and Art in Agreement in Sensory Relations?

The smell is a predetermined stimulus, and there is a smell in the ANT NEST, too. We are not familiar with this smell or what it belongs to. Using the sense of smell as a means of communication and secreting and using this smell that surprises us exclusively is at Ahmet Yiğider’s discretion. He uses the sense of smell and engages us in the process he established by returning to his past exclusively through this smell, which can be depicted in an art form. This form is one that we had never come across in art galleries.

The 1980s were a critical decade in terms of the sense of smell. Studies were conducted one after another on the sense whose existence had previously been denied, considered abstract and optional. Some of these studies began to turn into books., albeit a few. This happened on the academic front. But again, some surveys conducted in this period still insisted on considering the sense of smell as the least important and even the first to be discarded if there is a need to discard one.

This disregard, even ignoring, which had many supporters in intellectual circles, naturally makes one wonder where that began; the spirit of inquiry takes us thousands of years back to ancient Greece. The acceptance of the sense of sight as the gold standard and Plato’s endorsement of it as the basis of philosophy diverted into a fixed hierarchy of senses with the sense of being at the top by Aristotle. Regarding the sense of smell, the thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment did not position themselves too far from their counterparts in ancient Greece. The acceptance of the concentration of reason and logic, and therefore scientific enlightenment, on the senses of sight and sense of hearing brings Kant to the point that smell is futile and to no avail a sense.

Be assured that no other phenomenon in history has such a broad consensus, widespread and long-standing. The sense of smell, which is isolated from science and the world in the eyes of the masses, is inevitably pushed out of art for a very long time.

The only exception is the emergence of paintings by the early Dutch painters, where secular daily life images were included in their art instead of religious images; the sense of smell and nose of the organ became the focal point in these paintings. Even yet, the revelation allegorically came through the sense of sight, the “picture”.

On the other hand, in the period up to the 2000s, there are only a few names that included smell itself as a sensory stimulus, establishing a direct interactive connection between art and the sense of smell; Marcel Duchamp, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Joseph Beuys, Edward Kienholz, Takako Saito, Judy Chicago and a several other names… Of course, the indispensable aspect of smell is “volatility”. In other words, the fundamental properties of smell are volatile organic compounds, and these compounds, living up to their name, evaporate and lose their perceptible properties quickly. The scent is not solid. It cannot be put on canvas like paint, or it cannot be carved into a mass as a volatile substance. This is a factor that makes not only the production but also the exhibiting smell as a volatile substance really tricky.

Marcel Duchamp is one of the first and most well-known names that allowed the audience to come into contact with scent through their noses rather than their eyes. In 1938, he was employed as an artist-curator at the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme (International Surrealism Exhibition). He designed the exhibition’s main gallery with Wolfgang Paalen. The exhibition gallery floor was covered with oak leaves, grass, ferns, and a water pond with flowers and reeds. There were coffee bean sacks around and a working coffee roaster. As the coffee was roasted, visitors sensed “THE SMELL of BRASIL.”

It has changed a lot since 1938. It is no longer necessary to process, roast or grind the roasted coffee itself for its olfactory representation, especially if it is not symbolic. Mikhail Semenovich Tswett separated the pigments of plants using liquid column chromatography in 1903. Approximately forty-five years after Tswett, Erika Cremer designed the first gas column chromatography. She presented it to the world of science. This apparatus separated the multiple chemical compounds of the odour samples that we call their common names into their scientific constituents. With the introduction of mass spectrometry in the 1950s, it was now possible to see the formulae of everything that is in nature and contains volatile organic compounds or said “smells” on a computer printout (GC/MS). You could see the formula and perform a reconstruction by combining the listed components in the given amounts. Of course, the job is not just the machine because you are limited by the data on the machine printout.

Therefore, the human nose and brain must again come into play during the reconstruction phase; Things don’t just pop up “whoops”!

We have mentioned Tswett and Cremer above regarding the technology of analyzing nature’s odours. Still, other scientists have also contributed to the development of this technology, which began 120 years ago. However, I do not think it ever occurred to any of these people to use the olfactory analysis of an ant colony as an artistic feat, as Ahmet Yiğider did in his work The Ant Nest. It had probably escaped the attention of the majority of masses that these creatures, the ants which sometimes march in orderly and relentless bands on kitchen counters and sometimes around the anthills they form around the grounds, trying to reach their goals that we cannot understand or analyze, have a unique scent profile themselves. They are so distant from the human nose and physically so small that it is difficult to perceive their scents even when they form a big crowd.

The state that the general public ignores or pretends not to have sensed the smell is rendered from analysis to reconstruction by Ahmet Yiğider’s ANT NET exhibition through its place in the story in his memory. It evolves into an inevitable sensory stimulus and becomes an olfactory phenomenon by travelling from nose to brain.

This is not the first time Ahmet Yiğider has done this. He has established relationships between art and out-of-the-ordinary senses. I first heard about this project in 2016 for the Baksı Museum. In his own words, he created a sensory experience and conceptual approach through a sense of smell. He made an installation that defined concepts such as exile, homecoming, a sense of belonging to native land, and an urge to move by the effects of various scents.

In one of his sculpture installations, he changed the form of a tree; when you look at that instrumentalized tree mass, especially if you are familiar with the subject, it is impossible not to notice its aromatic structure.

Recently, he came up with his “Fig, Human, Soil” installation at the 9th Çanakkale Biennial in October 2024. He went beyond the smell that can be guessed from a distance, this time, guiding the participants through a tunnel formed by cotton fibres hanging from the ceiling into an interactive relationship with the smells of fig, human and soil that were isolated by the (GC/MS) apparatus we mentioned above and renditioned to match natural identical fig, human and soil smells.

The emotional space in our memory for each molecule that makes up the scents mentioned differs from Ahmet Yiğider’s.

In this sense, we can say that a distinct neural network is established in our minds, and other emotions are triggered in our limbic system. A unique experience is experienced for each visitor – and, moreover, in each visit session of all personal visitors. This situation reminds me a bit of John Cage. On August 29, 1952, at the Maverick Concert Hall, located in a grove of trees right next to the famous Woodstock grounds, pianist David Tudor performed John Cage’s Piece 4’33 for the first time. Tudor sits on the piano stool, places the notes on the board, closes the piano lid, and waits silently. He occasionally opens and closes the piano lid again and again.  Still, no keys are pressed for the specified period, and no sound is produced by the piano. After four minutes and 33 seconds, he gets up from his stool, turns to the audience, bows, and greets them. The composer aims for silence with this work, which changes with each performance. The stirrings of the audience in the hall, perhaps sometimes the wind, the shy coughing, and some of the audience getting up and leaving towards the end, are not sounds that are repeated at the same time every time. Each concert performance comes with its own accidental sounds, the audience becomes a part of the composer’s composition, and each concert you are a part of becomes unique.

When visiting the Ant Nest, what the person next to us had for breakfast or what cream we used that day added to the total experience as “accidental smells,” like the “accidental sounds” of Cage’s work. Smelling is the same as breathing; therefore, it is inevitable; “accidental smells” are like that, too.

In his artistic productions and sharings, Mr. Yigider prefers to exist on a multi-sensory platform. This allows both the stimulations of more than one sense and the transitivities between the senses to be included in the work. This is a choice, and this choice is shaped by the artist, sometimes putting one of these senses in the leading role and the others in supporting roles. This strengthens the uniqueness I mentioned earlier. In this exhibition we started to visit, there is no scented liquid in a bottle like the Baksı examples, or interpretations of fig, human or soil smells diffused into the environment. There are ants. Why do ants smell? They are not the only ones who smell; all living things smell. The fact that some of their smells are below our perception threshold does not mean they do not have smells. The scent is a chemical sense. We use our senses to communicate with the world outside of us. Since non-human creatures have not experienced evolutionary processes similar to ours and the concept of verbal communication has not developed, other senses, especially chemical communication, have gained more importance. It can provide numerical multiplicity to other forms of sensory experience. These creatures can feed through chemical communication, perform genetic transfer, determine their areas and have spatial ownership. A vital situation, namely chemical communication, is not a pleasure.

Living beings individually have a unique basal smell, a bio identity document. This scented document becomes the secret key to genetic transfer; species continue their lives by using it, and they do not run out. On top of this identity smell comes the olfactory expression of the message intended to be explicitly conveyed for the situation, and it blends with the basal smell. Therefore, the sample we smell in this installation contains more than one layer. The individual olfactory expressions of the ants, their collective olfactory expressions, the olfactory messages they give under stress, and the olfactory observations of their decomposition processes all come together and form a total, reaching its most intense state around the nest.

This is actually a perfume, a perfume specific to a species, where we have the opportunity to smell its state under certain conditions. Every perfume is a media consisting of volatile molecules instead of words. However, with Ahmet Yiğider’s choice, this perfume goes beyond being a media that carries messages between ants or ant communities and creates an interactive communication line from person to person in a way that is not thought possible by using ants as tools with their scents. Furthermore, every word said or written relates to the meaning bond established between the artist and the viewer, carrying it beyond this page towards the exhibition visitor.