Exploring this Smell of Apprehension: The Sámi Artist Reimagines Tate's Exhibition Space with Arctic Deer Inspired Installation

Attendees to Tate Modern are used to surprising experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an man-made sun, glided down spiral slides, and observed robotic sea creatures drifting through the air. Yet this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nose chambers of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this huge space—designed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages patrons into a labyrinthine design inspired by the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Once inside, they can wander around or unwind on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to tribal seniors sharing tales and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It may seem playful, but the exhibit celebrates a obscure scientific wonder: researchers have found that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the ambient air it breathes in by eighty degrees, helping the creature to survive in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "generates a perception of smallness that you as a human being are not in control over nature." Sara is a ex- writer, young adult author, and environmental activist, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that generates the chance to alter your viewpoint or evoke some modesty," she states.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The winding design is among various features in Sara's absorbing art project showcasing the traditions, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number roughly 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They've experienced discrimination, cultural suppression, and suppression of their language by all four states. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the installation also draws attention to the community's struggles connected to the environmental emergency, property rights, and imperialism.

Meaning in Materials

At the extended access slope, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot formation of skins ensnared by electrical wires. It can be read as a symbol for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this section of the installation, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, whereby solid layers of ice form as changing temperatures melt and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' main winter sustenance, lichen. Goavvi is a outcome of planetary warming, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Polar region than in other regions.

A few years back, I met with Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and joined Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they carried carts of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to distribute manually. The reindeer crowded round us, pawing the icy ground in vain attempts for lichen-covered bits. This expensive and laborious process is having a severe influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. However the alternative is death. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are dying—a number from starvation, others submerging after plunging into lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the installation is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

The sculpture also highlights the stark contrast between the industrial understanding of energy as a asset to be utilized for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi outlook of energy as an natural power in animals, people, and the environment. This venue's past as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi consider eco-imperialism by Nordic countries. In their efforts to be exemplars for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their legal protections, livelihoods, and traditions are endangered. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the arguments are rooted in environmental protection," Sara comments. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the discourse of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just striving to find better ways to persist in practices of expenditure."

Individual Conflicts

She and her relatives have themselves conflicted with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter regulations on herding. Previously, Sara's brother undertook a set of finally failed court actions over the required reduction of his animals, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara produced a four-year set of creations called Pile O'Sápmi including a massive drape of 400 animal bones, which was displayed at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it resides in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For many Sámi, visual expression seems the only domain in which they can be heard by outsiders. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|