Unveiling the Aroma of Anxiety: Máret Ánne Sara Reimagines The Gallery's Exhibition Space with Arctic Deer Influenced Artwork

Visitors to the renowned gallery are accustomed to unexpected experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an simulated sun, descended down spiral slides, and seen robotic sea creatures drifting through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nose chambers of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this huge space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a winding construction modeled after the expanded interior of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Inside, they can wander around or chill out on pelts, tuning in on earphones to community leaders sharing stories and knowledge.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why choose the nasal structure? It could seem playful, but the artwork celebrates a rarely recognized biological feat: researchers have discovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it takes in by eighty degrees, allowing the creature to survive in extreme Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara explains, "generates a feeling of insignificance that you as a individual are not superior over nature." Sara is a ex- writer, children's author, and rights advocate, who comes from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Possibly that fosters the possibility to change your outlook or trigger some humbleness," she continues.

An Homage to Indigenous Heritage

The maze-like structure is among various components in Sara's immersive art project showcasing the traditions, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They have faced oppression, integration policies, and suppression of their tongue by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the art also draws attention to the community's issues connected to the climate crisis, property rights, and external control.

Symbolism in Elements

Along the extended access incline, there's a looming, 26-meter structure of pelts ensnared by electrical wires. It represents a metaphor for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this component of the artwork, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an severe climatic event, wherein thick sheets of ice appear as changing temperatures melt and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' key cold-season nourishment, moss. Goavvi is a result of climate change, which is occurring up to four times faster in the Far North than globally.

A few years back, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they hauled trailers of supplementary feed on to the exposed frozen landscape to distribute by hand. The herd gathered round us, digging the icy ground in vain attempts for vegetative pieces. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive method is having a significant influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. Yet the other option is death. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are dying—some from hunger, others submerging after falling into streams through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the installation is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Perspectives

The installation also highlights the sharp difference between the industrial interpretation of power as a resource to be exploited for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an natural life force in creatures, individuals, and the environment. Tate Modern's past as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be standard bearers for clean sources, Nordic nations have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their legal protections, livelihoods, and culture are threatened. "It's hard being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the justifications are grounded in global sustainability," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the discourse of sustainability, but yet it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to persist in practices of use."

Individual Struggles

The artist and her relatives have personally disagreed with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter regulations on herding. A few years ago, Sara's sibling undertook a set of finally failed legal cases over the forced culling of his animals, apparently to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara created a extended collection of creations named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal screen of 400 reindeer skulls, which was shown at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it resides in the entryway.

Art as Awareness

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