Delving into the Smell of Fear: Máret Ánne Sara Transforms The Gallery's Exhibition Space with Reindeer Influenced Exhibit

Visitors to the renowned gallery are used to surprising encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an simulated sun, glided down helter skelters, and witnessed AI-powered jellyfish drifting through the air. But this marks the inaugural time they will be immersing themselves in the complex nose passages of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this cavernous space—created by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a maze-like design based on the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nose cavities. Once inside, they can meander around or unwind on reindeer hides, tuning in on earphones to Sámi elders telling tales and insights.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It may sound whimsical, but the exhibit pays tribute to a little-known natural marvel: researchers have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the creature to thrive in harsh Arctic climates. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara explains, "generates a perception of inferiority that you as a person are not dominant over nature." The artist is a former reporter, writer for kids, and land defender, who hails from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that generates the possibility to alter your viewpoint or spark some humility," she adds.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The maze-like design is part of a features in Sara's absorbing exhibition celebrating the heritage, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They have experienced discrimination, forced assimilation, and suppression of their dialect by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the art also highlights the people's challenges connected to the global warming, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Meaning in Materials

At the extended entry ramp, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot formation of reindeer hides entangled by electrical wires. It represents a symbol for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this section of the artwork, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, in which solid sheets of ice form as fluctuating conditions thaw and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' main cold-season sustenance, fungus. The condition is a result of planetary warming, which is happening up to four times faster in the Polar region than in other regions.

Previously, I met with Sara in a remote town during a icy season and went with Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they carried carts of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to dispense through labor. These animals surrounded round us, digging the icy ground in futility for mossy pieces. This resource-intensive and laborious method is having a significant impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the choice is death. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are succumbing—some from starvation, others suffocating after sinking in lakes and rivers through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the art is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of elements, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

The sculpture also highlights the sharp contrast between the industrial understanding of energy as a commodity to be utilized for gain and existence and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an innate power in animals, people, and the environment. Tate Modern's legacy as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be leaders for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the development of wind energy projects, water power facilities, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, livelihoods, and traditions are endangered. "It's challenging being such a small minority to stand your ground when the arguments are grounded in environmental protection," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the rhetoric of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to continue habits of use."

Family Struggles

The artist and her kin have themselves clashed with the national administration over its ever-stricter policies on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's sibling initiated a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, apparently to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara developed a four-year collection of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge curtain of four hundred cranial remains, which was displayed at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the lobby.

The Role of Art in Activism

Among the community, art appears the sole realm in which they can be listened to by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|