In a darkened room on Earth, an astronaut stands amongst a collection of moon rocks slowly and deliberately performing a maintenance task. With a grab stick in one hand and gas hose in another, he/she deploys the grab stick to pick up moon rocks spraying them, one by one, with the smell of the Moon. Titled Enter at Own Risk, this performance work is the creation of artist duo Hagen Betzwieser and Sue Corke who collaborate as WE COLONISED THE MOON. In this paper I consider the way in which the sense of smell has been deployed as an aesthetic object by this art duo and in so doing, unpack the qualities of smell that have traditionally made this a problematic sense with regards to its deployment within the space of the art gallery. These are spatial and temporal qualities that have been utilized by Betzwieser and Corke not only in the design of the installation space at Liverpool’s Foundation for Art and Creative Technology but also through the bringing together of maintenance practice and smell – the durational and the ephemeral – which has implications beyond the gallery space, imbuing the work with its critical edge.