Delving into this Smell of Apprehension: The Sámi Artist Reimagines The Gallery's Exhibition Space with Arctic Deer Inspired Artwork
Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an artificial sun, descended down spiral slides, and seen automated jellyfish hovering through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be immersing themselves in the complex nasal cavities of a reindeer. The newest artistic project for this cavernous space—developed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a labyrinthine construction based on the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nasal passages. Inside, they can meander around or relax on skins, listening on earphones to tribal seniors imparting stories and insights.
Why the Nose?
What's the focus on the nose? It could sound playful, but the installation pays tribute to a little-known natural marvel: scientists have discovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it inhales by 80 degrees celsius, helping the creature to endure in harsh Arctic conditions. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "creates a sense of inferiority that you as a individual are not in control over nature." She is a former reporter, young adult author, and land defender, who is from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Possibly that generates the possibility to shift your viewpoint or spark some humbleness," she continues.
An Homage to Sámi Culture
The labyrinthine installation is one of several elements in Sara's immersive commission celebrating the heritage, understanding, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They've faced persecution, cultural suppression, and suppression of their language by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the installation also spotlights the people's issues relating to the global warming, land dispossession, and colonialism.
Metaphor in Elements
Along the long entrance slope, there's a towering, 26-metre sculpture of skins trapped by power and light cables. It can be read as a symbol for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this section of the exhibit, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, whereby thick layers of ice appear as fluctuating temperatures liquefy and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' key winter nourishment, lichen. The condition is a result of planetary warming, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than elsewhere.
Three years ago, I visited Sara in a remote town during a icy season and went with Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they transported containers of food pellets on to the exposed frozen landscape to provide by hand. These animals gathered round us, digging the icy ground in vain for mossy bits. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive method is having a severe influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. But the choice is death. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are dying—a number from lack of food, others suffocating after falling into streams through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the art is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.
Diverging Worldviews
The installation also highlights the stark difference between the modern view of electricity as a commodity to be harnessed for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an innate life force in creatures, people, and nature. Tate Modern's history as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as eco-imperialism by Nordic countries. As they strive to be standard bearers for sustainable power, Nordic nations have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi argue their legal protections, ways of life, and traditions are endangered. "It's hard being such a small minority to protect your rights when the reasons are based on global sustainability," Sara notes. "Extractivism has co-opted the discourse of sustainability, but still it's just striving to find better ways to maintain habits of consumption."
Individual Challenges
The artist and her relatives have personally clashed with the national administration over its ever-stricter policies on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's brother undertook a sequence of unsuccessful legal cases over the required reduction of his herd, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a four-year set of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi including a huge screen of numerous animal bones, which was exhibited at the 2017's art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it resides in the entryway.
Art as Advocacy
For numerous Indigenous people, creative work is the exclusive sphere in which they can be understood by outsiders. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|
