Exploring the Smell of Fear: The Sámi Artist Revamps The Gallery's Turbine Hall with Arctic Deer Influenced Artwork

Visitors to the renowned gallery are accustomed to unexpected experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an artificial sun, slid down amusement rides, and seen automated jellyfish drifting through the air. However this marks the first time they will be immersing themselves in the complex nasal cavities of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this huge space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a labyrinthine construction based on the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Upon entering, they can wander around or chill out on skins, tuning in on earphones to tribal seniors imparting narratives and insights.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It could appear quirky, but the exhibit honors a obscure scientific wonder: scientists have discovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it takes in by 80°C, enabling the animal to endure in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "produces a perception of insignificance that you as a human being are not superior over nature." Sara is a former reporter, children's author, and rights advocate, who hails from a pastoral family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that fosters the possibility to alter your outlook or trigger some modesty," she states.

An Homage to Indigenous Heritage

The maze-like structure is part of a components in Sara's immersive commission celebrating the traditions, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They have faced persecution, cultural suppression, and repression of their tongue by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the art also draws attention to the community's struggles connected to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Elements

On the lengthy entry slope, there's a soaring, 26-meter formation of reindeer hides entangled by power and light cables. It can be read as a analogy for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this component of the exhibit, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, whereby solid sheets of ice develop as varying conditions thaw and ice over the snow, locking in the reindeers' main winter nourishment, lichen. The condition is a consequence of planetary warming, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than elsewhere.

A few years back, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and joined Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they hauled carts of supplementary feed on to the barren Arctic plains to provide manually. These animals crowded round us, scratching the icy ground in vain attempts for mossy morsels. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive process is having a significant impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the alternative is starvation. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are dying—a number from lack of food, others suffocating after falling into streams through unstable frozen surfaces. In a sense, the installation is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm introducing the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

The installation also underscores the clear difference between the modern understanding of electricity as a asset to be harnessed for gain and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an natural essence in creatures, people, and the environment. The gallery's legacy as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by regional governments. In their efforts to be standard bearers for sustainable power, these states have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of windfarms, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, livelihoods, and traditions are threatened. "It's hard being such a tiny group to stand your ground when the arguments are rooted in global sustainability," Sara comments. "Extractivism has adopted the discourse of environmentalism, but still it's just aiming to find better ways to continue practices of use."

Personal Conflicts

She and her relatives have themselves conflicted with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent regulations on herding. Previously, Sara's sibling initiated a sequence of finally failed lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, supposedly to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara produced a four-year collection of creations called Pile O'Sápmi featuring a colossal drape of 400 reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the national institution, where it resides in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work is the exclusive realm in which they can be listened to by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|