Unveiling the Smell of Apprehension: Máret Ánne Sara Revamps The Gallery's Turbine Hall with Arctic Deer Influenced Artwork

Visitors to Tate Modern are accustomed to unusual displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They've basked under an artificial sun, glided down amusement rides, and witnessed robotic sea creatures drifting through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this cavernous space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a maze-like design based on the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nasal passages. Inside, they can meander around or chill out on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to community leaders imparting tales and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It could appear whimsical, but the installation pays tribute to a rarely recognized biological feat: scientists have discovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it inhales by 80 degrees celsius, allowing the animal to endure in inhospitable Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "generates a perception of insignificance that you as a individual are not superior over nature." Sara is a former writer, young adult author, and land defender, who hails from a pastoral family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that creates the potential to alter your viewpoint or evoke some modesty," she continues.

An Homage to Indigenous Heritage

The labyrinthine structure is one of several elements in Sara's engaging exhibition celebrating the heritage, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They have experienced discrimination, forced assimilation, and repression of their language by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the installation also draws attention to the people's struggles associated with the global warming, property rights, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Components

On the extended access slope, there's a looming, 26-meter sculpture of pelts ensnared by electrical wires. 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 exhibit, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby dense coatings of ice appear as varying weather melt and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' key winter sustenance, lichen. The condition is a outcome of climate change, which is taking place up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than globally.

Previously, I met with Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and went with Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they carried trailers of animal nutrition on to the exposed Arctic plains to dispense through labor. The reindeer crowded round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain attempts for mossy bits. This expensive and demanding procedure is having a severe impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. However the choice is malnutrition. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are dying—some from starvation, others suffocating after sinking in streams through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the work is a monument to them. "With the layering of materials, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

The sculpture also underscores the clear difference between the industrial interpretation of electricity as a resource to be exploited for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an natural life force in animals, people, and the environment. Tate Modern's past as a coal and oil power station is connected to this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be standard bearers for sustainable power, Nordic nations have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of windfarms, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi assert their human rights, incomes, and culture are endangered. "It's hard being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the justifications are rooted in environmental protection," Sara notes. "Extractivism has adopted the language of environmentalism, but yet it's just striving to find better ways to persist in practices of consumption."

Individual Challenges

The artist and her relatives have themselves clashed with the state authorities over its ever-stricter rules on herding. In 2016, Sara's brother embarked on a set of finally failed court actions over the required reduction of his animals, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a extended series of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi including a massive screen of four hundred animal bones, which was shown at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it is displayed in the entryway.

Art as Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work seems the sole realm in which they can be heard by the global community. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|