Unveiling the Aroma of Anxiety: The Sámi Artist Transforms The Gallery's Turbine Hall with Arctic Deer Themed Installation

Guests to Tate Modern are accustomed to unexpected encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've basked under an artificial sun, glided down amusement rides, and observed automated jellyfish floating through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the complex nasal cavities of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this huge space—developed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a maze-like construction modeled after the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nasal airways. Upon entering, they can wander around or unwind on pelts, tuning in on headphones to Sámi elders sharing stories and knowledge.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It could sound playful, but the installation celebrates a obscure scientific wonder: scientists have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the surrounding air it breathes in by eighty degrees, helping the creature to survive in harsh Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "produces a sense of insignificance that you as a individual are not in control over nature." She is a ex- writer, children's author, and environmental activist, who comes from a pastoral family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that fosters the potential to shift your perspective or spark some humbleness," she adds.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The labyrinthine structure is part of a components in Sara's absorbing art project showcasing the culture, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total about 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They've experienced persecution, forced assimilation, and repression of their dialect by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the installation also draws attention to the people's issues associated with the climate crisis, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Materials

At the lengthy entry slope, there's a looming, 26-meter formation of pelts ensnared by electrical wires. It serves as a symbol for the societal frameworks restricting the Sámi. Part pylon, part spiritual ascent, this component of the artwork, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an severe climatic event, in which dense layers of ice form as varying weather melt and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' key winter nourishment, fungus. This phenomenon is a result of global heating, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Far North than in other regions.

A few years back, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they hauled carts of supplementary feed on to the barren tundra to provide manually. The reindeer gathered round us, pawing the frozen ground in futility for mossy bits. This resource-intensive and laborious procedure is having a significant effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. However the other option is death. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are perishing—some from starvation, others submerging after plunging into streams through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the installation is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of elements, in a way I'm introducing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

The sculpture also underscores the clear difference between the modern interpretation of electricity as a asset to be harnessed for gain and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an innate life force in creatures, people, and land. This venue's legacy as a fossil fuel plant is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be exemplars for renewable energy, these states have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, river barriers, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and way of life are at risk. "It's hard being such a small minority to defend yourself when the reasons are based on saving the world," Sara comments. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the language of sustainability, but yet it's just aiming to find alternative ways to maintain patterns of use."

Personal Challenges

She and her kin have personally clashed with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter regulations on herding. Previously, Sara's sibling initiated a sequence of finally failed lawsuits over the required reduction of his animals, apparently to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a extended series of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi including a massive curtain of 400 cranial remains, which was shown at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the entryway.

Art as Activism

Among the community, art seems the sole domain in which they can be heard by outsiders. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|