Unveiling this Smell of Apprehension: Máret Ánne Sara Transforms The Gallery's Turbine Hall with Arctic Deer Themed Artwork

Guests to Tate Modern are familiar to surprising experiences in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an artificial sun, slid down helter skelters, and observed AI-powered sea creatures floating through the air. But this marks the inaugural time they will be immersing themselves in the complex nasal chambers of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this huge space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a labyrinthine construction inspired by the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nasal airways. Upon entering, they can wander around or chill out on pelts, tuning in on headphones to Sámi elders sharing narratives and knowledge.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It might sound whimsical, but the exhibit honors a little-known natural marvel: researchers have discovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it inhales by eighty degrees, allowing the animal to endure in extreme Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "produces a sense of smallness that you as a person are not superior over nature." The artist is a former writer, children's author, and land defender, who is from a herding family in northern Norway. "Possibly that creates the possibility to change your perspective or evoke some modesty," she adds.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The labyrinthine structure is part of a components in Sara's absorbing exhibition honoring the traditions, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number about 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They've endured oppression, integration policies, and suppression of their language by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the installation also highlights the community's struggles connected to the climate crisis, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Meaning in Elements

On the extended access incline, there's a soaring, 26-meter formation of reindeer hides trapped by power and light cables. It can be read as a metaphor for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part heavenly staircase, this component of the installation, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein solid coatings of ice form as fluctuating weather liquefy and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary cold-season nourishment, moss. The condition is a result of climate change, which is taking place up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than globally.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they transported trailers of food pellets on to the barren tundra to distribute manually. These animals crowded round us, pawing the slippery ground in futility for lichen-covered pieces. This costly and labour-intensive procedure is having a severe influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the other option is malnutrition. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—a number from starvation, others drowning after plunging into streams through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the installation is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Perspectives

The sculpture also underscores the sharp difference between the industrial view of energy as a asset to be harnessed for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi philosophy of life force as an natural power in creatures, individuals, and the environment. Tate Modern's history as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by regional governments. While attempting to be standard bearers for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their human rights, livelihoods, and traditions are at risk. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the justifications are rooted in global sustainability," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has adopted the language of ecology, but yet it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to persist in patterns of use."

Family Conflicts

The artist and her relatives have personally conflicted with the national administration over its tightening policies on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's sibling initiated a set of unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara created a four-year set of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive screen of numerous animal bones, which was shown at the the show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it hangs in the lobby.

Creative Expression as Activism

For many Sámi, art is the sole realm in which they can be understood by outsiders. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|