Lauryn Mannigel

Lauryn Mannigel is an artist-researcher and PhD student in Media Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University. Her artistic research practice is experimental and interdisciplinary. It subscribes to contextual and socially engaged art while it is driven by diverse manifestations of social and cultural inequalities. Mannigel research uses a queer, feminist and decolonial lens. Since 2005, she has been questioning the Western cultural dominance of visual epistemology by exploring the sensory perception of smell, hearing, touch and taste. She currently explores the aesthetic and political potential of people’s scents in relation to Othering in Western society and science. Mannigel’s work aims to diversify, democratize, and decolonize perception and knowledge production of the way we perceive and communicate experiences of a person’s scents. She explores diversity in olfactory perception through developing culturally sensitive and inclusive art-science methods and techniques.

Mannigel has exhibited Love Sweat Love (2016, Mediamatic, NL), Smell Feel Match (2019, Kunsthalle Kiel, DE & VIVA Art Action, CA), Eat Me (2018, Wageningen University, NL), I Smell a Rat (2019, AdaX, CA & Goethe Institute Max Mueller Bhavan, IN), Moreover, she shared insights about her artistic research at conferences, such as EuroScience Open Forum (the Netherlands, 2022), ECRO2021 (Portugal), Uncommon Senses III (Canada, 2021) and Taboo- Transgression- & Transcendence (Austria, 2020). Moreover, she co-founded of the Smell Lab Spektrum (Berlin, 2015), organized the Smell Lab Spektrum reading group (Berlin, 2015), and organizes the Sensory Culture Club reading group (Berlin, 2016-).