Unveiling the Smell of Fear: Máret Ánne Sara Revamps The Gallery's Turbine Hall with Arctic Deer Inspired Installation

Attendees to Tate Modern are familiar to surprising encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an simulated sun, slid down amusement rides, and seen AI-powered sea creatures hovering through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nasal passages of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this cavernous space—developed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a winding structure based on the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nasal passages. Upon entering, they can meander around or unwind on skins, listening on earphones to Sámi elders telling tales and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It might seem whimsical, but the installation celebrates a little-known scientific wonder: experts have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it breathes in by eighty degrees, helping the animal to thrive in inhospitable Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "generates a feeling of inferiority that you as a person are not in control over nature." She is a former journalist, young adult author, and rights advocate, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that creates the possibility to change your viewpoint or trigger some humbleness," she adds.

A Tribute to Indigenous Heritage

The maze-like design is one of several features in Sara's immersive exhibition celebrating the culture, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi total about 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They've experienced persecution, forced assimilation, and suppression of their dialect by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the installation also highlights the community's struggles connected to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Meaning in Materials

On the extended entrance ramp, there's a towering, 26-metre sculpture of pelts entangled by utility lines. It represents a analogy for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this component of the exhibit, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein solid coatings of ice develop as fluctuating temperatures liquefy and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' main winter nourishment, fungus. The condition is a consequence of global heating, which is occurring up to four times faster in the Far North than in other regions.

Previously, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and went with Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they transported containers of food pellets on to the exposed tundra to distribute by hand. These animals crowded round us, pawing the frozen ground in vain for lichen-covered bits. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive procedure is having a drastic influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the choice is starvation. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are succumbing—a number from starvation, others suffocating after plunging into lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the work is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

The installation also underscores the clear divergence between the modern view of electricity as a asset to be utilized for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi philosophy of life force as an inherent essence in animals, individuals, and land. This venue's legacy as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by Nordic countries. As they strive to be leaders for renewable energy, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their traditional territory; the Sámi argue their human rights, livelihoods, and traditions are at risk. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the reasons are based on saving the world," Sara observes. "Mining practices has co-opted the discourse of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just striving to find more suitable ways to persist in patterns of use."

Family Conflicts

The artist and her relatives have themselves clashed with the national administration over its tightening policies on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's brother embarked on a sequence of finally failed lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara developed a extended collection of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal curtain of four hundred animal bones, which was shown at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later purchased by the public gallery, where it is displayed in the lobby.

The Role of Art in Activism

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