Remote Control at BAMPFA

Remote Control is an installation that expands my ongoing archive @movieolfaction—a collection of film stills paired with the on-screen subtitles that record fleeting references to smell. In mainstream film and television, olfactory remarks often pass as minor jokes or throwaway insults, yet they quietly rehearse cultural hierarchies: who is read as “clean” or “foul,” who is granted authority to judge, and who is left without a reply. For the MFA exhibition at BAMPFA, the work isolates and magnifies one subtitle line from A Call to Spy (2019): “A little gift. A bit of soap. → That bad?” [LAUGHTER]. By enlarging this moment and placing it under sustained attention, Remote Control makes visible how an apparently light exchange about “soap” functions as a gendered rebuke—an instance of sensory judgment that operates at the level of atmosphere rather than explicit plot. The title draws on Barbara Kruger’s Remote Control (1994) and its provocation—who speaks, who is silent—to frame subtitles as both aesthetic artifacts and cultural data: a textual infrastructure through which power, disgust, and social classification circulate.

Format: Installation (text-based / subtitle-based work, artist book, and database)

Source material: Subtitle line from A Call to Spy (2019): “A little gift. A bit of soap. → That bad?” [LAUGHTER]

Core elements: Enlarged text presentation of the subtitle (single-line focus), designed to foreground captioning as a visual-textual layer within the cinematic frame

Method: Appropriation and re-contextualization of subtitle language from a mainstream film; scale and isolation as the primary formal strategies

Related projects: SUBTITLES: Book One (portable archive) and @movieolfaction (ongoing screenshot archive / developing database)

Remote Control sits within my broader investigation of olfaction as a cultural and political lens in popular media. Because smell is difficult to represent audiovisually, it often appears in film as language—especially in subtitles that render sensory gestures (“[sniffs]”) and judgments (“You smell terrible”) as text. These captions are frequently the only durable record of minor olfactory commentary, allowing such moments to be archived, compared, and read as patterned discourse. Drawing on sensory studies and feminist media analysis, the installation treats the subtitle not as a neutral transcription but as a site where moral judgment becomes legible: smell stands in for virtue, status, desirability, or suspicion, and the right to name odor often mirrors wider asymmetries of authorship and narrative authority. By slowing one subtitle down to the scale of an artwork, Remote Control asks how “small” sensory remarks accumulate into a vocabulary of othering—and how this sensory politics might be made visible and therefore contestable.

Photography by David Schmitz.