Karola Braga
PROJECT
Karola Braga invites us to take the unexpected action and lean in to smell the rosewater running from this urinal. Her work explores the history, perception and cultural significance of scent. Here she pays tribute to one of the most influential works in art history, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, 1917, a readymade sculpture created from a urinal. She also references seventeenth-century France, where urban air was saturated with the unpleasant smell of open street latrines due to inadequate sanitation. To combat this, during public celebrations fountains were perfumed with rosewater, highlighting how fragrance has been used to reshape environments and our experience of them.
ABOUT
Karola Braga’s practice focuses on scent as a critical, sensorial and political medium. Working with ancestral materials such as resins, wax and smoke, alongside contemporary technology, she creates installations and sculptures that activate memory, power and collective experience, treating scent as a structure that connects past and present.
Braga holds a master’s degree in Visual Poetics from the University of São Paulo (ECA/USP) and a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the Armando Alvares Penteado Foundation (FAAP). Since 2017 she has participated in exhibitions and awards at institutions in Brazil and internationally, including Desert X AlUla (Saudi Arabia); the Mercosur Biennial (Brazil); Craft Contemporary Los Angeles (USA); and La Nueva Fábrica, Antigua (Guatemala). In 2025 she won the Sadakichi Award for Experimental Work with Scent at the Art and Olfaction Awards in Los Angeles.