Karola Braga (1988, São Caetano do Sul, Brazil) is an artist whose practice is rooted in smell as a critical, sensorial, and political language. She investigates scent as a field of friction between body, memory, and power, creating experiences that traverse the intimate and the collective, the visible and the invisible. In her work, scent is not ornament: it is structure, discourse, and living presence.
She works with ancestral technologies such as resins, smoke, wax, and ceramics, alongside synthetic formulations, microencapsulation, polymers, and textiles, expanding the sensorial listening of the world beyond the primacy of vision. Her production unfolds through installations, sculptures, performances, and site-specific works, addressing themes such as erasure, finitude, collective memory, and the continuities between past and present. Ancestrality emerges not as a fixed origin, but as a living force that traverses materials, knowledge, and practices, calling forth new modes of presence.
Since 2017, she has presented her work in institutional and independent contexts across Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and the United States. She has participated in exhibitions such as Desert X AlUla (Saudi Arabia), the Mercosur Biennial (Porto Alegre), Craft Contemporary (Los Angeles), Paço das Artes (São Paulo), and La Nueva Fábrica (Guatemala), where she held the solo exhibition La dimensión sensorial sagrada de los olores (2025). She has undertaken residencies at Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris), Kooshk Residency (Tehran, where she received the KARA Award 2018), LABVERDE (Amazon), and La Nueva Fábrica (Guatemala).
Among her recognitions, she won the Sadakichi Award for Experimental Work with Scent (Art and Olfaction Awards, Los Angeles, 2025), was a finalist for the same award in 2023, and was nominated for the PIPA Prize 2024, the CIFO Grants & Commissions Program (Miami, 2020), and the Bloom Art Prize (Cologne, 2019).
She is currently expanding her research on incense, olfactory mythologies, and sensorial cosmologies, investigating scent as an ancestral technology and as a field of tension between politics, spirituality, and contemporary poetics.