Unveiling this Scent of Anxiety: The Sámi Artist Reimagines Tate's Exhibition Space with Reindeer Influenced Installation

Attendees to Tate Modern are accustomed to surprising displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an artificial sun, glided down helter skelters, and observed robotic jellyfish drifting through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nasal passages of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this huge space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a maze-like construction based on the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Inside, they can stroll around or unwind on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to Sámi elders telling narratives and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It might seem whimsical, but the artwork honors a little-known biological feat: researchers have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it takes in by 80°C, allowing the creature to endure in harsh Arctic conditions. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "generates a feeling of insignificance that you as a person are not dominant over nature." The artist is a ex- writer, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who is from a pastoral family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that fosters the chance to alter your perspective or spark some humility," she continues.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The labyrinthine installation is one of several components in Sara's immersive commission showcasing the culture, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Partially migratory, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They have endured discrimination, cultural suppression, and eradication of their tongue by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the work also spotlights the group's challenges associated with the environmental emergency, property rights, and imperialism.

Meaning in Elements

Along the extended entrance ramp, there's a towering, 26-meter sculpture of skins trapped by electrical wires. It represents a analogy for the political and economic systems restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this section of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, wherein thick sheets of ice appear as changing weather liquefy and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' main cold-season nourishment, fungus. This phenomenon is a outcome of climate change, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than in other regions.

Previously, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they transported containers of supplementary feed on to the exposed tundra to distribute manually. The reindeer gathered round us, digging the frozen ground in futility for vegetative pieces. This expensive and demanding method is having a drastic effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. But the choice is starvation. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—a number from lack of food, others submerging after sinking in lakes and rivers through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the installation is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

This artwork also underscores the clear contrast between the western interpretation of electricity as a asset to be exploited for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi outlook of life force as an innate essence in creatures, people, and the environment. Tate Modern's legacy as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by regional governments. In their efforts to be leaders for sustainable power, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the development of windfarms, water power facilities, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their legal protections, ways of life, and way of life are at risk. "It's hard being such a tiny group to stand your ground when the arguments are based on saving the world," Sara comments. "Resource exploitation has adopted the discourse of ecology, but still it's just striving to find more suitable ways to maintain practices of consumption."

Personal Challenges

The artist and her kin have themselves clashed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent rules on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's sibling initiated a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the forced culling of his animals, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara developed a four-year collection of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge drape of four hundred cranial remains, which was shown at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the entrance.

Art as Awareness

For many Sámi, creative work seems the only domain in which they can be understood by the global community. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|