Bagh-e Hind: Scent Translations of Mughal & Rajput Garden Paintings
Curated by Bharti Lalwani and Nicolas Roth
July 15 – August 12, 2022
VISIT
The Institute for Art and Olfaction
932 Chung King Road
Los Angeles CA. 90012
IAO Gallery is accessible by wheelchair.
Directions: artandolfaction.com/visit
Opening Hours:
Wednesdays, 2 – 5pm
Thursdays, 2 – 5pm
Fridays, 3 – 5pm
Consult our Google Calendar for extra opening hours
On Fri. July 29, come meet perfumer Miss Layla of (fūm Fragrances), as she joins us in our open hours.
“We invite audiences to take pleasure in the aesthetic constructions of each painting – to saturate their senses in order to reimagine new dimensions of love, abundance and pleasure.”
– Curators Bharti Lalwani and Nicolas Roth
The Institute for Art and Olfaction is pleased to host the first physical exhibition of the Bagh-e Hind project – a multidisciplinary exhibition curated by art critic and perfumer Bharti Lalwani (India) and historian and literary scholar Nicolas Roth (USA).
For the exhibition at IAO Gallery, the curators selected five paintings that represent genre conventions from Mughal and Rajput courts. Replicated at size, these paintings depict aspects of the cultural experience of the garden in the 17th and 18th centuries in South Asia.
On display, also, are five scents created for the exhibition, interpreting the aromatic constructs of these Garden Paintings in five chapters: rose, narcissus, smoke, iris, and kewra. These scents were produced by Los Angeles based interdisciplinary artist and perfumer Miss Layla of fūm fragrances.. Bouquets of incense and soaps made by curator Bharti Lawlani are displayed alongside the perfumes. The paintings and scents are accompanied by Urdu poetry from the Mughal period with translations in English by Nicolas Roth, as well as a selection of plants.
Global audiences can experience this exhibition through an accompanying online catalogue containing essays and reading lists, and classical Hindustani music selected by Berkeley based architect Uzair Siddiqui that contextualises the mood and atmosphere of each painting.
(1) Maharana Jagat Singh II celebrating the Festival of Flowers in the Gulab Bari Garden (1750), Raghunath, son of Maluk Chand, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Perfume: Rose accord, cucumber, lily, magnolia, palmarosa.
Incense: Rose
Soaps: Rose, Rose Vetiver
(2) A Prince Having an Audience
Mughal, school of Jahangir, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Perfume: Narcissus, tuberose and jasmine accords, sweet grasses, mimosa, orange blossom, cypriol, clay, sage.
Incense: Lotus
Soap: Narcissus
(3) Samsam al-Daula Khan Dawran watching a firework display
Signed by Kalyan Rai (probably Kalyan Das, known as Chitarman II), Mughal, circa 1719-25, Private collection, current location unknown
Perfume: Sweet grasses, clover, violet leaf, saffron, patchouli, moss, cedar absolute, Java vetiver, sparkler accord.
Incense: Smoke
Soap: Smoke
(4) Garden Scene, Mughal, early 17th century, From an album of 32 paintings, Harvard Fine Arts Library, Special Collections SCW2016.06714
Perfume: Iris accord, violet leaf absolute, ylang, heliotrope, orange blossom, musk.
Incense: Agarwood
Soap: Iris
(5) Kamod Ragini, Kota, Rajasthan, India, ca. 1770-1775, Collection: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery
Perfume: Kewra, banana leaf, tuberose, galangal, frangipani, ylang ylang, champaca, sandalwood, musk, jasmine.
Incense: Kewra
Soap: Kewra
PHOTOS
ABOUT BAGH-E HIND
Bagh-e Hind is an exhibition conceptualized around the olfactory landscape of Mughal-era South Asia. This multidisciplinary exhibition is the result of a collaboration between art critic and perfumer Bharti Lalwani (India) and historian and literary scholar Nicolas Roth (USA).
Bagh-e Hind first launched on 10th September 2021 as an online exhibition. Nicolas, a specialist in Mughal-era horticultural writings, made deliberate selections of five paintings depicting garden scenes from the 17th and 18th centuries for Bharti to translate into fragrance, Edible Perfume™ and other synesthesia elements. From there, their project has expanded into a multi-disciplinary archive that exists online as a Digital Common, free for public access.
Viwable online, approximately 30 paintings illustrate the splendor of the time in painterly details of rose bushes as far as the eye can see, narcissus stems delicately held by courtly gentlemen, stunning displays of fireworks, irises within formal garden-scapes, and a discreet lover’s spot decorated with a bed of flowers amid a lush forest. The selected paintings, while in the public domain of digitized collections belonging to institutions outside of South Asia, have not been shown together, or been on display, much less contextualized with scent, botany, literature, flavor and sound.
THE TEAM
A collaboration across continents, Bharti and Nicolas dream of a world where fragrance is profoundly embedded in the way gardens are experienced, represented, and understood.
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BHARTI LALWANI
Curator, Perfumer (Incense and Soaps)
Bharti Lalwani is a perfumer and art critic. She trained as an artist at Central St. Martin’s College of Art and Design in London and later as a critic with a special focus on Southeast Asia at The Sotheby’s Institute of Art in Singapore. She established Litrahb Perfumery in 2018 as an extension of her artistic practice. The same year, she conceived of “Bagh-e Hind” and produced the exhibition in close collaboration with gardener-historian Nicolas Roth in 2021.
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NICOLAS ROTH
Curator
Nicolas Roth received a BA in Sanskrit and Indian Studies and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and a PhD in South Asian Studies from Harvard University. His dissertation focuses on the garden culture and horticultural writings of Mughal India from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, drawing on a range of textual genres in Sanskrit, Persian, and various forms of Urdu and Hindi as well as visual sources found in painting and other art forms. In addition to working on turning the dissertation into a book, he has recently written on the representation of architecture in Urdu poetry and is embarking on a new major project on Indo-Persian inshā or epistolary prose. As part of the latter, he is particularly interested in the functioning of inshā collections as a literary genre in its own right, and their representations of and relationship to various aspects of material culture.
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MISS LAYLA
Perfumer
Miss Layla is the nose behind the olfactive artistry of fūm fragrances. The fūm universe is made up of aromatic designs inspired by nostalgia, romance, nature, food, art and music. Layla is a self taught perfumer who remains committed to creating authentic studies of real world objects, plants, and places. She creates from within to weave her fragrance compositions into narratives that transport the wearer to far off landscapes and places in their imagination.
ABOUT IAO GALLERY
The Institute for Art and Olfaction Gallery is devoted to exhibitions, performances, installations and other expressions that make use of or engage with the medium of scent.
Website: artandolfaction.com/exhibitions
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