Delving into the Smell of Fear: The Sámi Artist Revamps The Gallery's Turbine Hall with Arctic Deer Inspired Exhibit

Visitors to Tate Modern are used to surprising displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have basked under an artificial sun, slid down spiral slides, and observed robotic jellyfish hovering through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nasal passages of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this immense space—developed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a winding construction based on the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Upon entering, they can wander around or relax on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to Sámi elders sharing tales and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It may sound quirky, but the exhibit honors a rarely recognized scientific wonder: experts have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the ambient air it breathes in by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the creature to endure in harsh Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "produces a sense of smallness that you as a individual are not superior over nature." Sara is a former journalist, children's author, and land defender, who is from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Maybe that generates the potential to alter your outlook or evoke some humbleness," she adds.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The winding structure is among various elements in Sara's absorbing art project honoring the culture, knowledge, and philosophy of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They have endured persecution, forced assimilation, and eradication of their tongue by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the installation also draws attention to the people's struggles relating to the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and external control.

Symbolism in Elements

At the extended access slope, there's a towering, eighty-five-foot structure of pelts entangled by electrical wires. It represents a metaphor for the societal frameworks constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part heavenly staircase, this part of the installation, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, whereby solid coatings of ice form as fluctuating temperatures thaw and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' main cold-season nourishment, lichen. This phenomenon is a result of climate change, which is occurring up to four times faster in the Far North than globally.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they hauled containers of animal nutrition on to the barren Arctic plains to dispense by hand. The herd crowded round us, scratching the slippery ground in futility for vegetative morsels. This expensive and labour-intensive method is having a significant impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. However the alternative is death. As these icy periods become routine, reindeer are succumbing—a number from lack of food, others drowning after falling into streams through prematurely melting ice. To some extent, the art is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Perspectives

This artwork also underscores the stark contrast between the modern understanding of power as a asset to be exploited for profit and survival and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an inherent life force in animals, humans, and the environment. This venue's past as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider eco-imperialism by Nordic countries. While attempting to be standard bearers for sustainable power, Nordic nations have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of windfarms, hydroelectric dams, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi assert their legal protections, livelihoods, and culture are endangered. "It's challenging being such a small minority to stand your ground when the justifications are rooted in saving the world," Sara comments. "Extractivism has co-opted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but yet it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to continue patterns of expenditure."

Personal Challenges

Sara and her kin have personally disagreed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent rules on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's brother initiated a sequence of finally failed lawsuits over the forced culling of his herd, supposedly to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a multi-year series of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive drape of numerous reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it hangs in the entrance.

Art as Advocacy

For numerous Indigenous people, visual expression seems the sole sphere in which they can be listened to by the global community. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|