Delving into the Aroma of Anxiety: The Sámi Artist Transforms The Gallery's Exhibition Space with Arctic Deer Inspired Exhibit

Attendees to Tate Modern are used to unexpected displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have basked under an man-made sun, glided down spiral slides, and observed AI-powered jellyfish drifting through the air. But this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nose cavities of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this immense space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a maze-like design based on the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Once inside, they can wander around or chill out on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to community leaders telling stories and insights.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why the nose? It could seem whimsical, but the artwork honors a rarely recognized scientific wonder: experts have found that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it inhales by eighty degrees, enabling the creature to survive in harsh Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "produces a perception of smallness that you as a person are not in control over nature." She is a former journalist, young adult author, and rights advocate, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Possibly that fosters the potential to change your perspective or trigger some modesty," she continues.

A Tribute to Indigenous Heritage

The maze-like design is part of a features in Sara's engaging commission celebrating the heritage, understanding, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They've faced persecution, forced assimilation, and repression of their language by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the installation also draws attention to the people's struggles relating to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and external control.

Meaning in Materials

At the lengthy access incline, there's a towering, eighty-five-foot structure of skins ensnared by electrical wires. It serves as a symbol for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this section of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi name for an harsh environmental condition, wherein thick layers of ice form as changing temperatures liquefy and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' main winter nourishment, moss. The condition is a outcome of planetary warming, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Far North than globally.

A few years back, I visited Sara in a remote town during a icy season and joined Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they hauled trailers of supplementary feed on to the exposed tundra to provide manually. These animals crowded round us, scratching the frozen ground in vain attempts for mossy pieces. This expensive and labour-intensive procedure is having a significant influence on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the other option is starvation. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—a number from lack of food, others suffocating after plunging into water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the installation is a memorial to them. "With the layering of materials, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

The sculpture also underscores the clear difference between the industrial interpretation of power as a asset to be utilized for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of energy as an innate power in animals, individuals, and the environment. This venue's history as a coal and oil power station is connected to this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be exemplars for renewable energy, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the construction of windfarms, hydroelectric dams, and mines on their traditional territory; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and culture are at risk. "It's hard being such a small minority to stand your ground when the reasons are rooted in global sustainability," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the language of ecology, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to persist in habits of use."

Personal Conflicts

The artist and her kin have personally conflicted with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent policies on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's sibling initiated a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara created a four-year set of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive screen of numerous animal bones, which was exhibited at the 2017 event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the lobby.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

Among the community, creative work appears the exclusive domain in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|