Delving into this Aroma of Apprehension: Máret Ánne Sara Transforms The Gallery's Turbine Hall with Reindeer Influenced Installation

Attendees to Tate Modern are used to unusual experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have basked under an artificial sun, descended down helter skelters, and seen robotic sea creatures floating through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the complex nasal chambers of a reindeer. The newest artistic project for this huge space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a winding design inspired by the expanded interior of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Inside, they can meander around or relax on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to tribal seniors telling narratives and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why the nose? It may sound playful, but the exhibit pays tribute to a little-known biological feat: experts have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it inhales by 80°C, helping the creature to thrive in harsh Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "produces a feeling of inferiority that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." Sara is a ex- writer, writer for kids, and environmental activist, who hails from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that generates the potential to change your viewpoint or trigger some humbleness," she continues.

An Homage to Indigenous Heritage

The winding installation is among various elements in Sara's absorbing exhibition honoring the traditions, science, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They've faced oppression, cultural suppression, and eradication of their tongue by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the art also spotlights the community's issues associated with the global warming, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Components

Along the long entrance ramp, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot formation of reindeer hides trapped by utility lines. It represents a metaphor for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this component of the installation, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi name for an harsh environmental condition, in which dense coatings of ice appear as fluctuating weather liquefy and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary cold-season nourishment, fungus. The condition is a consequence of planetary warming, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than in other regions.

Previously, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and joined Sámi reindeer keepers on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they transported containers of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to distribute by hand. The reindeer gathered round us, scratching the slippery ground in futility for vegetative bits. This resource-intensive and demanding method is having a drastic impact on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. Yet the alternative is death. As these icy periods become frequent, reindeer are perishing—some from hunger, others submerging after falling into streams through prematurely melting ice. To some extent, the work is a monument to them. "With the layering of elements, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

The sculpture also highlights the clear divergence between the western view of energy as a asset to be harnessed for profit and survival and the Sámi philosophy of life force as an innate power in creatures, individuals, and nature. The gallery's legacy as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as eco-imperialism by regional governments. While attempting to be exemplars for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, water power facilities, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and traditions are at risk. "It's hard being such a limited population to defend yourself when the arguments are rooted in environmental protection," Sara notes. "Mining practices has adopted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but still it's just striving to find more suitable ways to persist in habits of expenditure."

Family Conflicts

The artist and her kin have personally disagreed with the state authorities over its tightening policies on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's sibling undertook a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara created a four-year series of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi including a huge curtain of 400 reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the the show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it is displayed in the entryway.

The Role of Art in Activism

For many Sámi, visual expression seems the only sphere in which they can be heard by the global community. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|