Exploring this Smell of Anxiety: Máret Ánne Sara Revamps The Gallery's Turbine Hall with Reindeer Inspired Artwork

Attendees to Tate Modern are used to surprising experiences in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an artificial sun, glided down amusement rides, and seen automated sea creatures hovering through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the complex nose chambers of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a winding construction modeled after the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose passages. Inside, they can wander around or relax on skins, listening on earphones to Sámi elders telling tales and wisdom.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It may sound playful, but the artwork honors a rarely recognized scientific wonder: researchers have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it breathes in by eighty degrees, enabling the creature to thrive in extreme Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "produces a sense of smallness that you as a person are not superior over nature." The artist is a former journalist, writer for kids, and land defender, who is from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that fosters the possibility to change your outlook or evoke some humbleness," she states.

A Tribute to Indigenous Heritage

The labyrinthine installation is part of a elements in Sara's engaging commission showcasing the heritage, science, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number about 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They have endured oppression, cultural suppression, and suppression of their dialect by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the art also draws attention to the community's struggles associated with the climate crisis, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Elements

At the long entrance ramp, there's a towering, 26-meter formation of skins trapped by utility lines. It represents a metaphor for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part spiritual ascent, this section of the exhibit, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, in which dense coatings of ice appear as changing temperatures melt and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' main cold-season food, moss. The condition is a outcome of climate change, which is happening up to four times faster in the Polar region than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they hauled containers of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured tundra to provide manually. The herd crowded round us, pawing the icy ground in vain attempts for vegetative pieces. This resource-intensive and demanding method is having a drastic impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the alternative is death. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are perishing—some from lack of food, others submerging after plunging into lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the art is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

The installation also underscores the sharp divergence between the industrial interpretation of power as a commodity to be harnessed for gain and existence and the Sámi philosophy of life force as an innate essence in animals, individuals, and the environment. This venue's past as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by regional governments. While attempting to be exemplars for clean sources, these states have locked horns with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi argue their legal protections, incomes, and way of life are threatened. "It's hard being such a tiny group to protect your rights when the reasons are based on environmental protection," Sara notes. "Mining practices has appropriated the discourse of ecology, but yet it's just striving to find more suitable ways to continue practices of expenditure."

Personal Conflicts

The artist and her family have themselves disagreed with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter rules on herding. A few years ago, Sara's sibling initiated a series of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, apparently to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara produced a extended set of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a colossal drape of four hundred animal bones, which was shown at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it is displayed in the lobby.

Creative Expression as Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, art appears the only sphere in which they can be understood by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|