Unveiling the Smell of Fear: The Sámi Artist Transforms The Gallery's Turbine Hall with Reindeer Inspired Exhibit

Attendees to Tate Modern are accustomed to surprising displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They've basked under an artificial sun, descended down spiral slides, and witnessed robotic jellyfish floating through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nose chambers of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this cavernous space—created by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes patrons into a maze-like construction inspired by the expanded interior of a reindeer's nasal passages. Upon entering, they can stroll around or chill out on reindeer hides, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors telling narratives and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It might sound whimsical, but the exhibit honors a little-known natural marvel: researchers have found that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it inhales by 80°C, helping the animal to endure in harsh Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "produces a sense of smallness that you as a human being are not superior over nature." Sara is a ex- reporter, children's author, and rights advocate, who is from a pastoral family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that fosters the potential to shift your outlook or spark some humbleness," she adds.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The maze-like design is part of a components in Sara's engaging art project honoring the traditions, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They've experienced discrimination, integration policies, and repression of their dialect by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi mythology and origin tale, the installation also draws attention to the people's issues connected to the environmental emergency, property rights, and external control.

Metaphor in Components

On the lengthy entrance slope, there's a towering, eighty-five-foot structure of skins entangled by power and light cables. It can be read as a analogy for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this section of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, whereby thick sheets of ice form as fluctuating temperatures liquefy and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' key winter nourishment, fungus. Goavvi is a outcome of global heating, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than globally.

Previously, I met with Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and joined Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they transported trailers of supplementary feed on to the barren frozen landscape to distribute manually. The reindeer surrounded round us, digging the slippery ground in futility for mossy bits. This costly and labour-intensive method is having a severe influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. However the alternative is malnutrition. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—some from lack of food, others submerging after falling into water bodies through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the work is a tribute to them. "With the layering of elements, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

The installation also highlights the sharp difference between the modern understanding of electricity as a asset to be exploited for gain and existence and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an inherent life force in creatures, humans, and nature. Tate Modern's legacy as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by regional governments. In their efforts to be leaders for sustainable power, these states have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, hydroelectric dams, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi contend their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and culture are at risk. "It's hard being such a limited population to defend yourself when the arguments are grounded in global sustainability," Sara notes. "Extractivism has adopted the language of ecology, but yet it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to persist in habits of expenditure."

Family Challenges

The artist and her family have personally clashed with the national administration over its ever-stricter rules on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's sibling initiated a sequence of finally failed court actions over the required reduction of his animals, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara developed a four-year set of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi including a massive drape of 400 animal bones, which was shown at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the entrance.

The Role of Art in Awareness

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