Unveiling the Scent of Fear: Máret Ánne Sara Revamps Tate's Exhibition Space with Arctic Deer Themed Installation

Attendees to Tate Modern are accustomed to surprising displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an artificial sun, descended down spiral slides, and witnessed robotic jellyfish floating through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nose chambers of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a winding design based on the expanded interior of a reindeer's nasal passages. Inside, they can wander around or chill out on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to community leaders imparting tales and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It may seem quirky, but the artwork honors a rarely recognized scientific wonder: experts have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it inhales by eighty degrees, allowing the creature to survive in extreme Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "produces a perception of inferiority that you as a individual are not in control over nature." Sara is a ex- journalist, children's author, and land defender, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that creates the potential to shift your perspective or spark some modesty," she adds.

An Homage to Indigenous Heritage

The labyrinthine structure is among various features in Sara's immersive exhibition honoring the heritage, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi number about 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They have faced discrimination, cultural suppression, and repression of their language by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the work also spotlights the community's issues connected to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and external control.

Metaphor in Materials

On the long entrance incline, there's a soaring, 26-meter sculpture of pelts trapped by electrical wires. It can be read as a metaphor for the societal frameworks restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this component of the exhibit, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi word for an severe climatic event, wherein thick layers of ice develop as varying conditions thaw and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' key winter food, lichen. The condition is a consequence of planetary warming, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Polar region than in other regions.

Previously, I met with Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and joined Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they transported carts of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to distribute by hand. The reindeer crowded round us, pawing the icy ground in vain attempts for lichen-covered morsels. This costly and labour-intensive method is having a severe effect on herding practices—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the other option is malnutrition. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are dying—some from starvation, others submerging after falling into streams through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the art is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of elements, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

This artwork also emphasizes the clear divergence between the western view of power as a resource to be harnessed for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi worldview of energy as an inherent life force in creatures, people, and land. This venue's history as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be exemplars for clean sources, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, river barriers, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their human rights, ways of life, and way of life are at risk. "It's hard being such a small minority to protect your rights when the arguments are grounded in environmental protection," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the language of environmentalism, but yet it's just striving to find alternative ways to maintain habits of expenditure."

Individual Conflicts

Sara and her kin have themselves conflicted with the state authorities over its tightening policies on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's sibling undertook a set of finally failed lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, apparently to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a multi-year series of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive drape of numerous reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it is displayed in the entrance.

Art as Awareness

For many Sámi, creative work appears the sole sphere in which they can be understood by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|