About

Lauryn Mannigel is an artist-researcher living and working between Tempe (US) and Berlin (DE). She holds an M.A. in Contemporary Art and New Media from Université Paris 8 (2009) and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Media Arts & Sciences at Arizona State University. Her master’s thesis explored the aesthetic experience of 20th and 21st-century process-oriented, contextual, and relational art practices, highlighting a consequence of modern (abstract) theoretical discourse: the gap between artist, artwork, and observer.

Mannigel’s artistic practice is experimental, hybrid, and interdisciplinary, intersecting with the humanities and the sciences. She was introduced to interdisciplinary practice-led research during her M.A. studies (2007-2008) at Concordia University (CA), a transformative experience where she discovered research-creation. This approach taught her critical ways to integrate her artistic practice with scholarly investigation to produce new media works. Additionally, her time at the Interfaculty ArtScience (2008-2009) in The Hague (NL) expanded her creative horizons by revealing how scientific research can be critically woven into artistic practice.

Mannigel challenges the Western cultural dominance of visual epistemology by exploring primarily non-visual modalities and perception the perception, such as smell, hearing, touch, and taste. Thematically, her work engages with diverse manifestations of social and cultural inequalities. Mannigel currently creates experiential and discursive social spaces that explore the aesthetic and political potential of people’s smell. In this line of work, she has developed and presented performative experiments such as Love Sweat Love (2016), Eat Me (2018), Smell Feel Match (2019), I Smell a Rat (2019), Something in the Air (2022-), and Scents of Belonging (2023-), in several countries across the Western hemisphere and India.

Lauryn has also developed curatorial projects that foster discussions on artistic processes, presentation formats, and interdisciplinary collaborations, such as the Think Tank (Montreal, 2007) and the Think & Action Tank (2014-2015). Her interest in non-visual sensory experiences in experimental exhibition settings led her to co-curate the site-specific, non-visual exhibition The Ability to Fail in Public (2014), an exploration of the role of failure in creative processes through sound installations. Recently, her passion for smell inspired her to co-found the Smell Lab Spektrum (2015) and organize the Smell Lab Spektrum reading group (2015), which explored smell from various perspectives, including art history, aesthetics, curating, and sociology. Since 2016, she has organized the Sensory Culture Club reading group, which examines the role of society and culture in the historically repressed senses of smell, touch, and taste through diverse readings.