Delving into this Smell of Apprehension: The Sámi Artist Reimagines The Gallery's Turbine Hall with Arctic Deer Influenced Artwork

Attendees to Tate Modern are used to unexpected encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an artificial sun, slid down spiral slides, and observed automated sea creatures hovering through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this cavernous space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a labyrinthine design modeled after the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nose passages. Once inside, they can stroll around or relax on skins, tuning in on headphones to Sámi elders telling tales and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It may appear whimsical, but the artwork celebrates a obscure scientific wonder: experts have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it breathes in by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the creature to survive in harsh Arctic conditions. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "generates a sense of smallness that you as a person are not superior over nature." The artist is a ex- reporter, children's author, and land defender, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Possibly that creates the potential to alter your perspective or spark some humbleness," she adds.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The winding structure is part of a elements in Sara's immersive exhibition celebrating the traditions, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They've faced persecution, forced assimilation, and repression of their dialect by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the installation also spotlights the group's challenges relating to the global warming, land dispossession, and external control.

Symbolism in Materials

Along the lengthy entrance incline, there's a looming, 26-metre structure of pelts trapped by power and light cables. It serves as a metaphor for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part heavenly staircase, this section of the installation, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi word for an severe climatic event, whereby solid layers of ice appear as fluctuating weather thaw and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' key winter sustenance, moss. This phenomenon is a consequence of planetary warming, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Arctic than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they hauled containers of food pellets on to the barren tundra to dispense through labor. The reindeer crowded round us, digging the icy ground in futility for lichen-covered bits. This costly and labour-intensive procedure is having a significant impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. But the other option is death. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are perishing—a number from starvation, others submerging after falling into streams through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the art is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

The installation also underscores the sharp divergence between the western interpretation of electricity as a resource to be utilized for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi outlook of life force as an innate power in animals, humans, and nature. This venue's past as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as eco-imperialism by regional governments. As they strive to be exemplars for sustainable power, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, river barriers, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their legal protections, incomes, and way of life are at risk. "It's hard being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the reasons are grounded in environmental protection," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the language of sustainability, but nonetheless it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to maintain habits of consumption."

Individual Conflicts

Sara and her family have themselves clashed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent policies on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's sibling embarked on a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful court actions over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, apparently to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara produced a extended series of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive drape of 400 cranial remains, which was displayed at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the lobby.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For many Sámi, visual expression is the sole realm in which they can be heard by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|