The Taste of Discovery recreates, as a sensorial installation, an Arctic boating voyage Kessler made during the winter of 2007 — the shifts between extreme heat and cold, inside and outside the boat, that structured the trip. Built inside the raw industrial hall of Kunstraum Dornbirn as two adjacent rooms, the work splits that experience into its constituent temperatures: one room holds a large mirror that continuously cycles between freezing and melting, projected with the ghost image of an iceberg; the other houses the compressor that generates the mirror’s cooling agent — the engine room, producing heat, noise, and the visible labor behind the illusion next door.
The mirrored surface doubles as a reference to the picture-plane of painterly still life even as it refuses to hold a fixed image, its ice building and collapsing in real time. Viewers move between the two conditions the boat itself imposed: the cold room’s sensorial monolith of transformation, and the equipment room’s plain evidence of the machine that makes it possible.
The project also produced a companion edition: The Taste of Discovery, Eau de Parfum, a scent Kessler developed and packaged as a limited-edition perfume, extending the installation’s sensorial premise — an expedition condensed into a smell — into an object and an advertising campaign styled after commercial fragrance ads.
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