Delving into this Smell of Anxiety: The Sámi Artist Reimagines Tate's Exhibition Space with Reindeer Inspired Artwork

Visitors to the renowned gallery are familiar to unexpected encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an man-made sun, glided down helter skelters, and seen robotic jellyfish hovering through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nasal cavities of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this huge space—developed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a labyrinthine construction modeled after the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose passages. Inside, they can wander around or chill out on skins, tuning in on headphones to Sámi elders sharing tales and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It may seem quirky, but the exhibit honors a little-known natural marvel: experts have found that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it inhales by 80°C, allowing the animal to survive in extreme Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "produces a perception of insignificance that you as a individual are not superior over nature." She is a ex- writer, writer for kids, and land defender, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that creates the chance to alter your viewpoint or evoke some modesty," she continues.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The winding installation is part of a elements in Sara's absorbing art project showcasing the culture, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They've experienced discrimination, integration policies, and suppression of their tongue by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the art also highlights the community's issues connected to the global warming, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Materials

Along the lengthy entry slope, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot sculpture of reindeer hides entangled by power and light cables. It serves as a analogy for the political and economic systems restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this part of the artwork, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an harsh environmental condition, in which solid coatings of ice appear as changing temperatures thaw and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary winter sustenance, moss. The condition is a consequence of global heating, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than in other regions.

Previously, I met with Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and joined Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they hauled carts of animal nutrition on to the exposed tundra to distribute through labor. The reindeer crowded round us, scratching the frozen ground in futility for lichen-covered morsels. This expensive and laborious procedure is having a significant influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. Yet the choice is death. As these icy periods become frequent, reindeer are perishing—a number from lack of food, others submerging after sinking in streams through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the art is a memorial to them. "With the layering of elements, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

This artwork also emphasizes the stark contrast between the western understanding of power as a asset to be utilized for gain and survival and the Sámi outlook of life force as an inherent life force in creatures, people, and land. The gallery's past as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by regional governments. In their efforts to be standard bearers for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have clashed with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, river barriers, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and culture are endangered. "It's hard being such a small minority to protect your rights when the justifications are based on saving the world," Sara notes. "Mining practices has appropriated the language of sustainability, but yet it's just aiming to find alternative ways to persist in patterns of use."

Family Struggles

The artist and her relatives have personally disagreed with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter regulations on herding. Previously, Sara's sibling embarked on a sequence of finally failed legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, supposedly to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a four-year collection of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge screen of four hundred cranial remains, which was displayed at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the lobby.

Art as Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, visual expression seems the exclusive sphere in which they can be heard by outsiders. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|