PRACTICE




Shahira Hammad is an architect, olfactory artist, and exhibition designer based in New York. Her practice engages scent, material processes, and spatial experience to explore how environments are perceived, inhabited, and remembered over time. Grounded in architectural thinking, her work approaches space as a lived and relational condition, shaped through movement, proximity, and sensory presence.

Her projects investigate how ecological and cultural histories persist within sites, often in forms that are invisible, buried, or erased. Rather than representing these conditions, she creates environments in which they become perceptible through the body. Sensory atmospheres and spatial choreography operate together, allowing meaning to emerge through attention, duration, and shared experience.




METHODS



Her work is informed by fieldwork, foraging, and material experimentation. Through the collection of plants and site-responsive materials, she develops an embodied understanding of place that informs both scent creation and spatial decisions.

Scent plays a central role in her practice because of its intimate relationship to memory, emotion, and bodily awareness. Smell operates before language and resists visual hierarchy. It requires closeness and attention, and it unfolds over time rather than at a glance.

In her work, scent functions as an environmental medium rather than an aroma or object. It shapes atmosphere, orientation, and movement through space, allowing ecological and cultural registers, such as labor, decay, ritual, and transformation, to coexist without resolving into a single narrative.

This makes scent a spatial tool, one that activates perception and situates the body within an environment rather than representing it from a distance.




PRESENTED AT



Her work has been shown in gallery, institutional, and public settings, including Olfactory Art Keller, the Center for Architecture, the Outsider Art Fair, Plexus Projects, Gypsum Gallery, and the Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial, as well as cultural platforms in the United States and internationally.


AVAILABILITY



Shahira Hammad is available for:

  • Site-responsive olfactory installations
  • Scent design for exhibitions and cultural institutions
  • Experiential design
  • Consultations related to sensory and spatial experience


For commissions, collaborations, or inquiries, please use the contact link.
© Shahira Hammad 2026