Exploring the Aroma of Fear: Máret Ánne Sara Revamps The Gallery's Turbine Hall with Arctic Deer Inspired Exhibit

Guests to Tate Modern are familiar to surprising experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an simulated sun, glided down helter skelters, and seen automated sea creatures hovering through the air. But this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nose passages of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this huge space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a labyrinthine design modeled after the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Upon entering, they can meander around or chill out on pelts, listening on headphones to tribal seniors sharing stories and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It may sound whimsical, but the installation celebrates a obscure natural marvel: experts have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it takes in by eighty degrees, helping the creature to thrive in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "produces a sense of smallness that you as a person are not superior over nature." She is a former reporter, children's author, and environmental activist, who comes from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that creates the chance to shift your viewpoint or evoke some humbleness," she adds.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The winding design is part of a elements in Sara's engaging exhibition celebrating the culture, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total about 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They have faced persecution, integration policies, and suppression of their dialect by all four states. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the installation also spotlights the group's struggles connected to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and external control.

Symbolism in Components

On the lengthy access ramp, there's a looming, 26-metre formation of reindeer hides ensnared by electrical wires. It can be read as a analogy for the societal frameworks constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this component of the artwork, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, wherein solid sheets of ice form as changing conditions liquefy and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary cold-season sustenance, lichen. Goavvi is a result of planetary warming, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than in other regions.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and went with Sámi herders on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they hauled trailers of supplementary feed on to the exposed Arctic plains to dispense by hand. The reindeer surrounded round us, digging the slippery ground in futility for vegetative bits. This resource-intensive and demanding process is having a significant effect on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the alternative is malnutrition. As these icy periods become frequent, reindeer are perishing—some from starvation, others drowning after sinking in lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. In a sense, the work is a monument to them. "With the layering of elements, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

The installation also highlights the clear contrast between the western view of electricity as a commodity to be exploited for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an natural life force in creatures, people, and the environment. This venue's past as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by Nordic countries. As they strive to be exemplars for sustainable power, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of windfarms, water power facilities, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi argue their human rights, ways of life, and way of life are endangered. "It's challenging being such a limited population to defend yourself when the reasons are based on global sustainability," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has adopted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find alternative ways to persist in habits of expenditure."

Family Struggles

The artist and her family have personally disagreed with the national administration over its ever-stricter regulations on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's brother undertook a series of finally failed court actions over the required reduction of his livestock, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara developed a four-year series of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive screen of numerous reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it hangs in the lobby.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work is the only domain in which they can be understood by outsiders. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|