Exploring the Scent of Anxiety: The Sámi Artist Reimagines The Gallery's Turbine Hall with Arctic Deer Inspired Installation

Visitors to the renowned gallery are used to unusual experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an simulated sun, slid down amusement rides, and seen automated jellyfish floating through the air. Yet this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nose passages of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this cavernous space—developed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages patrons into a maze-like structure modeled after the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Upon entering, they can meander around or relax on skins, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors sharing tales and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It might sound playful, but the exhibit pays tribute to a little-known scientific wonder: researchers have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the ambient air it breathes in by eighty degrees, allowing the creature to endure in harsh Arctic conditions. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "creates a perception of insignificance that you as a individual are not in control over nature." She is a former reporter, young adult author, and land defender, who hails from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Possibly that creates the possibility to alter your outlook or spark some humility," she states.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The labyrinthine design is one of several features in Sara's immersive exhibition celebrating the culture, understanding, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi count about 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They've endured discrimination, cultural suppression, and suppression of their tongue by all four nations. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the installation also draws attention to the people's issues connected to the global warming, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Elements

On the long entrance incline, there's a looming, 26-metre sculpture of reindeer hides entangled by electrical wires. It can be read as a metaphor for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Part pylon, part spiritual ascent, this part of the installation, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, whereby thick coatings of ice develop as changing temperatures liquefy and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary cold-season food, lichen. This phenomenon is a result of planetary warming, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than elsewhere.

Previously, I met with Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi herders on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they carried carts of food pellets on to the wind-scoured tundra to provide through labor. The reindeer crowded round us, digging the slippery ground in futility for lichen-covered pieces. This costly and demanding method is having a severe impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. Yet the choice is malnutrition. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—some from lack of food, others suffocating after falling into water bodies through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the installation is a monument to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

The installation also highlights the sharp divergence between the western interpretation of power as a asset to be utilized for gain and survival and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an innate power in animals, people, and land. Tate Modern's past as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by regional governments. As they strive to be leaders for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, river barriers, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi argue their legal protections, ways of life, and way of life are threatened. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to stand your ground when the arguments are grounded in saving the world," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has adopted the language of sustainability, but yet it's just striving to find better ways to maintain patterns of use."

Family Struggles

The artist and her kin have personally clashed with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter regulations on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's brother embarked on a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the forced culling of his herd, apparently to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara created a extended collection of creations named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive screen of 400 animal bones, which was displayed at the the event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the national institution, where it hangs in the entryway.

The Role of Art in Activism

For many Sámi, art appears the sole sphere in which they can be listened to by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|