The way up to Kunstverein Wilhelmshöhe leads through the forest. Silver fir, needles underfoot, resin in the warmth. Up the old staircase the smell is still there, only different. Arranged and composed, with a cool note in it that doesn’t come from here. The exhibition begins before you see anything.
In the first room, a film covers the windows, and the light turns green. Janus, the Roman god of thresholds, looks back and forward at once with his two faces. Within the work “Janus”, Strasbourg turpentine evaporates, a resin taken from the bark blisters of the silver fir. People once laid it on wounds and breathed it against coughs. Outside, the tree stands. Inside, it only gives up its scent under heat.
The next room is blue. “Adonia” needs no heat. Four limbs lie on the floor, cast in opalescent glass and shaped like ex-votos, the offerings people leave out of gratitude or in exchange for help they hope for. Inside them, camphor sublimates, going from solid to gas without ever turning liquid. You can’t see any of it. You smell it while it disappears.
The Adonia was a festival in ancient Greece. Women grew fast-sprouting plants on the rooftops, which shot up within days and withered just as quickly. Rising and fading were one and the same.
The same transition happens twice, once forced and once on its own. “Phoenixing” is the state in between, and it lasts the full seven weeks.
Four faces hang on the wall. In the last room there are balloons, and visitors take the scent samples from them themselves, one at a time, in their own order, for as long as they like.
Chaveli Sifre is a Puerto Rican artist, born in Würzburg in 1987, and lives in Berlin. For more than ten years she has worked with scent as a material, in the places where botany, healing and religious practice still belonged together. Her work has recently been shown at Kunsthalle Osnabrück, the Julia Stoschek Foundation, WIELS and MACBA Barcelona. She received the Villa Romana fellowship in 2025 and a Fundación Botín fellowship in 2026.
Exhibition dates:
19.09.-08.11.2026, open Wednesday to Sunday, 3-6 pm, open from Wednesday to Sunday, 3 to 6 p.m.
Address:
Kunstverein Wilhelmshöhe
Schöllbronner Str. 86
76275 Ettlingen
More information here.