Exploring this Scent of Anxiety: The Sámi Artist Transforms The Gallery's Exhibition Space with Reindeer Themed Exhibit

Guests to the renowned gallery are accustomed to unexpected experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They have basked under an simulated sun, slid down helter skelters, and observed robotic jellyfish hovering through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nasal cavities of a reindeer. The current artist commission for this huge space—developed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a maze-like structure based on the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Inside, they can stroll around or relax on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to tribal seniors imparting tales and insights.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It might seem quirky, but the artwork pays tribute to a rarely recognized biological feat: researchers have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it takes in by eighty degrees, enabling the animal to survive in extreme Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "generates a sense of insignificance that you as a person are not in control over nature." The artist is a former reporter, children's author, and rights advocate, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Possibly that creates the chance to change your outlook or evoke some humbleness," she adds.

An Homage to Indigenous Heritage

The winding design is among various features in Sara's engaging commission showcasing the culture, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count about 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They've endured oppression, cultural suppression, and repression of their dialect by all four nations. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the work also highlights the people's issues associated with the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and external control.

Metaphor in Elements

At the long entrance ramp, there's a looming, 26-metre structure of reindeer hides ensnared by electrical wires. It serves as a metaphor for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this component of the installation, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, in which solid sheets of ice form as fluctuating weather thaw and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' main cold-season nourishment, lichen. The condition is a consequence of planetary warming, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than globally.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they transported containers of food pellets on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to dispense by hand. These animals crowded round us, pawing the icy ground in vain for lichen-covered pieces. This costly and laborious process is having a severe impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. But the other option is death. As these icy periods become routine, reindeer are dying—some from lack of food, others drowning after plunging into lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the art is a memorial to them. "With the layering of elements, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Perspectives

The installation also emphasizes the sharp divergence between the modern understanding of power as a asset to be utilized for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi outlook of life force as an natural essence in animals, individuals, and the environment. This venue's past as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by Nordic countries. In their efforts to be leaders for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of windfarms, river barriers, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their human rights, ways of life, and culture are threatened. "It's hard being such a tiny group to protect your rights when the arguments are rooted in global sustainability," Sara comments. "Mining practices has co-opted the rhetoric of sustainability, but yet it's just striving to find alternative ways to persist in practices of consumption."

Family Struggles

The artist and her kin have personally clashed with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter policies on herding. In 2016, Sara's sibling embarked on a set of unsuccessful legal cases over the forced culling of his livestock, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a extended collection of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive drape of numerous animal bones, which was exhibited at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it hangs in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work appears the sole sphere in which they can be understood by outsiders. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|