Delving into this Scent of Fear: The Sámi Artist Reimagines Tate's Turbine Hall with Reindeer Inspired Installation

Guests to Tate Modern are used to unexpected encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have basked under an simulated sun, glided down helter skelters, and observed automated jellyfish floating through the air. But this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nasal cavities of a reindeer. The latest artistic project for this cavernous space—developed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a winding structure modeled after the expanded interior of a reindeer's nasal airways. Upon entering, they can meander around or unwind on reindeer hides, tuning in on earphones to community leaders telling tales and wisdom.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It might sound quirky, but the installation honors a obscure natural marvel: scientists have found that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it inhales by 80°C, allowing the creature to endure in inhospitable Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "produces a perception of insignificance that you as a person are not dominant over nature." The artist is a former reporter, children's author, and rights advocate, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Maybe that creates the chance to change your viewpoint or spark some humbleness," she continues.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The labyrinthine installation is part of a features in Sara's immersive art project showcasing the traditions, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number about 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They have experienced discrimination, forced assimilation, and suppression of their tongue by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the art also spotlights the group's issues connected to the climate crisis, loss of territory, and external control.

Symbolism in Components

At the lengthy entry incline, there's a looming, 26-metre formation of pelts entangled by utility lines. It serves as a metaphor for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part heavenly staircase, this component of the artwork, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein solid layers of ice form as fluctuating weather thaw and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' main winter food, fungus. Goavvi is a outcome of global heating, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than globally.

A few years back, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they transported trailers of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to dispense manually. The herd gathered round us, scratching the slippery ground in futility for vegetative bits. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive process is having a severe influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the choice is malnutrition. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—a number from starvation, others submerging after sinking in water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the installation is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

The sculpture also highlights the sharp divergence between the modern understanding of electricity as a resource to be utilized for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi outlook of life force as an inherent essence in animals, humans, and nature. Tate Modern's past as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be standard bearers for renewable energy, these states have locked horns with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, river barriers, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and way of life are at risk. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to defend yourself when the reasons are grounded in saving the world," Sara notes. "Extractivism has co-opted the discourse of sustainability, but still it's just striving to find alternative ways to persist in practices of use."

Family Challenges

Sara and her kin have personally conflicted with the state authorities over its increasingly stringent regulations on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's sibling undertook a sequence of finally failed lawsuits over the required reduction of his herd, supposedly to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara developed a four-year set of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi including a massive drape of four hundred animal bones, which was displayed at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later purchased by the public gallery, where it hangs in the entryway.

The Role of Art in Advocacy

For many Sámi, visual expression seems the sole sphere in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|