Exploring the Aroma of Fear: The Sámi Artist Transforms The Gallery's Turbine Hall with Arctic Deer Themed Exhibit

Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an artificial sun, slid down helter skelters, and seen robotic sea creatures floating through the air. However this marks the first time they will be immersing themselves in the detailed nose passages of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a labyrinthine design based on the expanded inside of a reindeer's nasal passages. Once inside, they can meander around or unwind on reindeer hides, tuning in on earphones to community leaders telling stories and insights.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It may seem quirky, but the exhibit honors a little-known natural marvel: scientists have discovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it breathes in by eighty degrees, helping the creature to thrive in harsh Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "generates a perception of insignificance that you as a individual are not in control over nature." The artist is a former journalist, young adult author, and rights advocate, who hails from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that generates the chance to change your perspective or trigger some humility," she states.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The winding installation is part of a components in Sara's engaging commission celebrating the traditions, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They've endured persecution, cultural suppression, and eradication of their language by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi belief system and founding narrative, the art also draws attention to the people's struggles associated with the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Materials

On the extended access incline, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot formation of reindeer hides ensnared by utility lines. It serves as a analogy for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this part of the artwork, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, in which dense coatings of ice appear as changing conditions melt and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' main winter food, lichen. This phenomenon is a outcome of global heating, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Far North than elsewhere.

A few years back, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a icy season and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they hauled trailers of food pellets on to the barren frozen landscape to dispense manually. The reindeer crowded round us, scratching the icy ground in vain for vegetative pieces. This resource-intensive and laborious procedure is having a significant influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. However the choice is malnutrition. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—some from starvation, others submerging after sinking in water bodies through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the installation is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

The installation also underscores the clear contrast between the western view of electricity as a commodity to be utilized for profit and survival and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an natural essence in creatures, people, and land. Tate Modern's history as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by Nordic countries. While attempting to be leaders for renewable energy, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of windfarms, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and traditions are at risk. "It's challenging being such a small minority to stand your ground when the arguments are based on global sustainability," Sara notes. "Extractivism has co-opted the language of sustainability, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find better ways to continue patterns of use."

Individual Challenges

She and her kin have themselves disagreed with the state authorities over its ever-stricter policies on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's brother undertook a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful court actions over the forced culling of his animals, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara produced a multi-year set of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi including a huge drape of four hundred animal bones, which was exhibited at the 2017 event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the lobby.

The Role of Art in Advocacy

For many Sámi, visual expression appears the exclusive domain in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|