Exploring this Scent of Fear: The Sámi Artist Revamps Tate's Exhibition Space with Arctic Deer Themed Artwork
Visitors to the renowned gallery are familiar to surprising encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an man-made sun, slid down helter skelters, and witnessed AI-powered jellyfish drifting through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nasal passages of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this cavernous space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a maze-like construction based on the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Inside, they can meander around or chill out on reindeer hides, tuning in on earphones to Sámi elders telling narratives and knowledge.
Why the Nose?
What's the focus on the nose? It may seem quirky, but the artwork pays tribute to a rarely recognized biological feat: experts have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it breathes in by 80°C, helping the creature to endure in harsh Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara notes, "produces a sense of inferiority that you as a person are not superior over nature." Sara is a former writer, young adult author, and environmental activist, who comes from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Possibly that generates the potential to alter your outlook or evoke some humility," she adds.
A Tribute to Indigenous Heritage
The winding installation is part of a elements in Sara's absorbing exhibition honoring the heritage, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They've experienced oppression, integration policies, and repression of their dialect by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the art also draws attention to the people's issues associated with the global warming, land dispossession, and external control.
Metaphor in Materials
On the lengthy entry ramp, there's a looming, 26-metre formation of pelts trapped by electrical wires. It represents a analogy for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this part of the exhibit, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby thick sheets of ice appear as varying temperatures melt and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' main cold-season sustenance, lichen. This phenomenon is a result of global heating, which is happening up to much more rapidly 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 accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they carried carts of food pellets on to the barren frozen landscape to dispense by hand. The reindeer surrounded round us, scratching the frozen ground in vain attempts for vegetative morsels. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive method is having a significant impact on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the alternative is malnutrition. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—some from hunger, others drowning after falling into lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the art is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.
Diverging Perspectives
This artwork also underscores the clear divergence between the industrial view of power as a commodity to be exploited for profit and existence and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an natural power in animals, individuals, and nature. Tate Modern's history as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider environmental exploitation by Nordic countries. As they strive to be leaders for sustainable power, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, water power facilities, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their legal protections, incomes, and way of life are at risk. "It's challenging being such a limited population to defend yourself when the justifications are grounded in saving the world," Sara observes. "Mining practices has co-opted the language of ecology, but yet it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to continue patterns of expenditure."
Personal Challenges
She and her relatives have themselves conflicted with the Norwegian government over its tightening regulations on herding. Previously, Sara's sibling initiated a series of ultimately unsuccessful court actions over the required reduction of his animals, apparently to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara developed a four-year collection of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge drape of 400 reindeer skulls, which was shown at the 2017's art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it resides in the entryway.
Creative Expression as Advocacy
Among the community, art is the only realm in which they can be understood by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|
