Delving into the Scent of Anxiety: The Sámi Artist Revamps Tate's Exhibition Space with Arctic Deer Themed Artwork

Attendees to the renowned gallery are used to unusual experiences in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an simulated sun, descended down helter skelters, and seen automated jellyfish floating through the air. But this marks the first time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nose cavities of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this immense space—designed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages patrons into a labyrinthine construction based on the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose cavities. Inside, they can stroll around or chill out on pelts, tuning in on headphones to Sámi elders telling narratives and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It could sound whimsical, but the artwork honors 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 takes in by 80°C, enabling the animal to survive in extreme Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "generates a sense of inferiority that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." She is a ex- writer, writer for kids, and environmental activist, who comes from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that fosters the chance to shift your outlook or evoke some humility," she adds.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The labyrinthine structure is part of a features in Sara's immersive art project celebrating the culture, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi number about 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They have faced oppression, forced assimilation, and eradication of their tongue by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the art also highlights the community's struggles connected to the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and external control.

Metaphor in Elements

At the extended access slope, there's a towering, eighty-five-foot formation of reindeer hides entangled by electrical wires. It serves as a analogy for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this component of the installation, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, in which dense layers of ice appear as changing weather thaw and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary cold-season sustenance, fungus. This phenomenon is a result of global heating, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than in other regions.

A few years back, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a icy season and went with Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they hauled trailers of animal nutrition on to the barren Arctic plains to dispense manually. The herd surrounded round us, digging the frozen ground in vain for vegetative pieces. This resource-intensive and laborious method is having a severe impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. However the alternative is malnutrition. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are perishing—a number from lack of food, others drowning after plunging into streams through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the installation is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

The installation also underscores the clear contrast between the modern understanding of energy as a commodity to be harnessed for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi worldview of energy as an inherent life force in creatures, people, and the environment. This venue's past as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be standard bearers for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of windfarms, water power facilities, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their human rights, livelihoods, and traditions are threatened. "It's hard being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the arguments are rooted in saving the world," Sara notes. "Mining practices has co-opted the language of environmentalism, but still it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to maintain patterns of use."

Personal Struggles

The artist and her kin have themselves clashed with the national administration over its ever-stricter rules on herding. Previously, Sara's sibling initiated a series of unsuccessful lawsuits over the forced culling of his livestock, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara created a multi-year series of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal screen of numerous animal bones, which was displayed at the the show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the public gallery, where it hangs in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Awareness

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