Exploring this Scent of Anxiety: Máret Ánne Sara Revamps Tate's Exhibition Space with Arctic Deer Influenced Exhibit

Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to surprising displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have basked under an artificial sun, descended down amusement rides, and witnessed automated sea creatures drifting through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The current artist commission for this cavernous space—created by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a winding design modeled after the expanded interior of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Once inside, they can stroll around or chill out on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to tribal seniors telling stories and wisdom.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It could seem playful, but the installation celebrates a little-known natural marvel: scientists have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it breathes in by eighty degrees, helping the creature to endure in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "creates a feeling of insignificance that you as a individual are not in control over nature." She is a ex- journalist, children's author, and land defender, who is from a pastoral family in northern Norway. "Maybe that generates the chance to alter your outlook or evoke some humility," she adds.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The labyrinthine structure is among various features in Sara's immersive exhibition celebrating the heritage, science, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Partially migratory, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They have faced discrimination, integration policies, and eradication of their dialect by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the work also draws attention to the group's challenges connected to the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Materials

Along the long entry ramp, there's a looming, 26-metre sculpture of skins entangled by power and light cables. It can be read as a metaphor for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this component of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein solid sheets of ice appear as varying conditions melt and ice over the snow, locking in the reindeers' primary cold-season food, moss. This phenomenon is a result of global heating, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than globally.

A few years back, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and went with Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they hauled trailers of animal nutrition on to the exposed tundra to distribute through labor. The herd gathered round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain attempts for mossy morsels. This resource-intensive and laborious procedure is having a severe effect on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the choice is malnutrition. As goavvi winters become frequent, reindeer are perishing—a number from hunger, others submerging after sinking in water bodies through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the installation is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

This artwork also underscores the stark difference between the modern interpretation of power as a asset to be utilized for gain and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an innate life force in animals, individuals, and the environment. Tate Modern's past as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by regional governments. In their efforts to be exemplars for clean sources, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the development of windfarms, water power facilities, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi assert their legal protections, livelihoods, and traditions are threatened. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to stand your ground when the justifications are based on environmental protection," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the rhetoric of sustainability, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find better ways to continue practices of expenditure."

Family Conflicts

Sara and her kin have themselves clashed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent rules on herding. In 2016, Sara's brother embarked on a set of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara created a multi-year series of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge screen of numerous cranial remains, which was exhibited at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the lobby.

The Role of Art in Activism

For many Sámi, visual expression appears the sole sphere in which they can be heard by the global community. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|