The flowers in Faux Flora do not exist. They never have. They were invented in Reykjavík by a family of artists and perfumers, given names and fragrances and life cycles, and now they are blooming in a darkened gallery on the third floor of the Anchorage Museum, where visitors are invited to lean in and smell them.
Faux Flora opens October 9, 2026, and runs through September 12, 2027, in the museum's West Galleries. It is the first museum exhibition ever mounted by Fischersund, the Reykjavík perfumery and art collective founded in 2017 by four siblings: Jónsi, Inga, Lilja, and Sigurrós Birgisdóttir. The show premiered at the National Nordic Museum in Seattle, organized by that museum's chief curator, Leslie Anne Anderson, in collaboration with the artists. Its national tour, which brings it to Anchorage, is supported by Icelandair.
If the name Jónsi rings a bell, it should. He is the frontman of Sigur Rós, the Icelandic post-rock band whose ethereal falsetto and invented language have drifted through listeners' ears for three decades. But Jónsi has spent roughly fifteen years quietly studying perfumery, and his sisters eventually pushed him to make it public. "He was always showing us his creations, and we were amazed, but he was never happy with anything," Inga told The Stranger. "Finally, we kind of bullied him into releasing one scent!"
That nudge became a family enterprise. Jónsi had a house in downtown Reykjavík where he kept a private studio for music and perfume; when he moved his studio to Los Angeles, the building sat empty. The siblings painted the walls and turned it into Fischersund — a place that is part shop, part gallery, part venue, and, in its own right, part art installation. The collective's artistic board also includes Sindri and Kjartan Holm, and its members work across fragrance, music, photography, sculpture, digital graphics, video, and design. Sigurrós is a perfumer and the collective's lead artisan; Ingibjörg works in painting, sculpture, digital graphics, video, and photography; Lilja's practice spans photography, performance, video, sound, and installation.
Faux Flora grew out of a very Icelandic fact: the island has fewer than 500 native plant species. Rather than document them, the collective invented new ones. As Seattle Magazine's Rachel Gallaher put it, the exhibition illustrates the five life cycles of a plant "with a twist — the plants are born from human memories and experiences rather than seed and earth."
The show unfolds in five chapters that map the botanical onto the human. Germination becomes birth. Growth becomes childhood. Flowering becomes adolescence. Seed formation becomes adulthood. Dispersal becomes death. Each chapter pairs sculpted and 3D-rendered flowers with its own fragrance and its own soundscape, so that the room changes as you move through it — in the air, in the ear, in the eye.
The scents are not abstractions. Fischersund published the formulas, and they read like inventories of a life. The first, keyed to germination, lists porcelain, mountain milk, concrete, cotton, dust, and saliva, over bergamot, cream, salt, iris, white musk, and ambroxan. The second, for childhood, is built from paintbrush, sugar rush, grass stains, growing pains, band-aids, and orange peel — lemon peel, lavender, bell pepper, tomato leaf, petitgrain, salt licorice, raspberry, cedarwood, vetiver, musk. The third, adolescence, smells of lipstick, leather shoes, cigarette smoke, mascara, and spilled cocktails. The fourth, adulthood, gathers golden amber, resin tears, labdanum, tangled roots, combined efforts, and a cardboard box. The fifth, death, is the absorption of all light: a dead vessel, ash, blackened earth.
Fischersund sells a Discovery Set of 8-milliliter vials of all five, hand-poured in Iceland and accompanied by limited-edition cards featuring artwork by co-founder and creative director Ingibjörg Birgisdóttir, along with scented poems meant to carry the wearer through each stage.
The exhibition arrives in Anchorage on a wave of attention to what museums can do with the nose. The New York Times, in a 2024 piece on olfactory exhibitions, wrote that Fischersund is "moving art beyond the realm of the visual and into experiences that need to be heard, felt and even smelled to be believed." Reviewing the Seattle premiere for The Seattle Times, Margo Vansynghel described picking up a small bell jar, bringing it to her face, and closing her eyes — milky and soft, coconut, fresh linen, a hint of vanilla. She called the show's "abstract sonic landscapes — calm, galactic sound waves resounding through the space" otherworldly, and concluded: "In a world that feels volatile and scary, 'Faux Flora' feels like a gift of respite."
It is also, by design, a show you experience rather than simply look at. The Seattle Times noted that it engages all the senses but one — taste. Visitors move among alien flowers that bloom and grow and bubble in three dimensions while sound trickles and crackles overhead, and the scents do what scent does: reach past language into memory. That is the premise the collective is working from, the well-documented relationship between smell and recollection, and it is why the flowers can be fake and still feel personal. The exhibition's own framing is that each flower stirs emotion and invites a distinct experience, combining familiar Icelandic motifs and fragrances into an invented botanical landscape.
For Alaska, the timing is notable. Anchorage and Reykjavík share a latitude band, a volcanic-and-glacial vocabulary, and a short, intense growing season; a show about the plants of the North Atlantic, imagined rather than catalogued, lands differently here than it might in a temperate city. And because Faux Flora is a general-admission museum exhibition rather than a ticketed one-night performance, it will be there for nearly a year. Anyone can drop in, walk the five chapters, and leave smelling something that does not exist anywhere else.