Exploring this Scent of Apprehension: Máret Ánne Sara Reimagines The Gallery's Exhibition Space with Reindeer Influenced Artwork

Guests to Tate Modern are accustomed to unexpected encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an man-made sun, glided down spiral slides, and seen robotic jellyfish drifting through the air. However this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nose cavities of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this immense space—developed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a labyrinthine design modeled after the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Once inside, they can stroll around or relax on reindeer hides, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors sharing tales and insights.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It might appear whimsical, but the exhibit pays tribute to a rarely recognized scientific wonder: experts have discovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it breathes in by eighty degrees, enabling the animal to survive in harsh Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "produces a feeling of smallness that you as a individual are not in control over nature." The artist is a former writer, writer for kids, and land defender, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that creates the potential to change your viewpoint or spark some modesty," she states.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The labyrinthine structure is among various features in Sara's absorbing exhibition honoring the heritage, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number about 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They have experienced discrimination, forced assimilation, and repression of their tongue by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the work also highlights the group's issues connected to the global warming, loss of territory, and external control.

Symbolism in Components

At the extended entry ramp, there's a towering, 26-metre structure of pelts trapped by electrical wires. It represents a symbol for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this component of the exhibit, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, wherein solid sheets of ice appear as fluctuating conditions melt and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' key winter food, fungus. Goavvi 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 the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and joined Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they carried trailers of food pellets on to the barren frozen landscape to dispense manually. The herd gathered round us, digging the slippery ground in vain for lichen-covered bits. This costly and demanding procedure is having a significant effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the other option is death. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are succumbing—some from lack of food, others drowning after plunging into water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the work is a monument to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Perspectives

This artwork also emphasizes the sharp difference between the industrial interpretation of electricity as a resource to be harnessed for gain and existence and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an natural essence in creatures, individuals, and nature. Tate Modern's past as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be exemplars for sustainable power, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, water power facilities, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their legal protections, incomes, and culture are threatened. "It's hard being such a tiny group to stand your ground when the justifications are rooted in saving the world," Sara notes. "Mining practices has appropriated the rhetoric of ecology, but still it's just aiming to find better ways to persist in practices of consumption."

Family Challenges

She and her kin have themselves disagreed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent rules on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's sibling initiated a set of unsuccessful legal cases over the forced culling of his herd, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara produced a extended series of creations named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge screen of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it resides in the entrance.

Art as Awareness

For many Sámi, creative work appears the only realm in which they can be understood by people of other nations. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|