Exploring this Smell of Fear: The Sámi Artist Transforms Tate's Turbine Hall with Arctic Deer Inspired Artwork

Attendees to the renowned gallery are used to unexpected displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an simulated sun, descended down amusement rides, and seen robotic jellyfish floating through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nasal passages of a reindeer. The latest artistic project for this huge space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a maze-like construction inspired by the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Once inside, they can stroll around or chill out on reindeer hides, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors imparting tales and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It may appear whimsical, but the installation honors a obscure biological feat: researchers have discovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the surrounding air it takes in by 80°C, helping the creature to endure in extreme Arctic climates. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "creates a perception of insignificance that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." Sara is a ex- writer, young adult author, and environmental activist, who comes from a pastoral family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that fosters the possibility to alter your viewpoint or spark some modesty," she continues.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The winding installation is one of several features in Sara's engaging commission showcasing the culture, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They've experienced discrimination, cultural suppression, and eradication of their tongue by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the installation also spotlights the group's issues relating to the climate crisis, property rights, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Materials

Along the lengthy entrance incline, there's a towering, eighty-five-foot structure of pelts entangled by utility lines. It can be read as a metaphor for the political and economic systems restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this section of the installation, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, wherein dense layers of ice form as varying conditions thaw and ice over the snow, locking in the reindeers' primary winter nourishment, fungus. Goavvi is a consequence of planetary warming, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Polar region than elsewhere.

A few years back, I met with Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they carried containers of food pellets on to the barren Arctic plains to distribute manually. The reindeer gathered round us, scratching the frozen ground in futility for mossy morsels. This costly and laborious method is having a drastic influence on herding practices—and on the animals' natural survival. However the choice is malnutrition. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are dying—a number from starvation, others suffocating after plunging into lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the work is a monument to them. "With the layering of elements, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

The installation also emphasizes the sharp contrast between the industrial understanding of power as a commodity to be exploited for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi outlook of life force as an innate life force in animals, humans, and the environment. This venue's past as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by regional governments. As they strive to be standard bearers for renewable energy, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, water power facilities, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi argue their legal protections, incomes, and culture are threatened. "It's hard being such a limited population to protect your rights when the justifications are grounded in saving the world," Sara comments. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the discourse of sustainability, but yet it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to persist in practices of expenditure."

Personal Conflicts

Sara and her relatives have personally conflicted with the national administration over its increasingly stringent policies on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's brother embarked on a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the forced culling of his herd, supposedly to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a extended series of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi including a huge curtain of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the 2017's art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it hangs in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, art seems the only sphere in which they can be understood by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|