Exploring this Smell of Fear: The Sámi Artist Reimagines The Gallery's Exhibition Space with Reindeer Inspired Artwork

Attendees to the renowned gallery are used to unusual encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have basked under an simulated sun, slid down spiral slides, and witnessed robotic jellyfish hovering through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nose cavities of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this huge space—designed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a winding structure modeled after the expanded inside of a reindeer's nose cavities. Inside, they can stroll around or unwind on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to tribal seniors telling stories and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It could appear whimsical, but the exhibit celebrates a little-known biological feat: researchers have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the ambient air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the creature to endure in extreme Arctic climates. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "produces a perception of smallness that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." She is a former writer, writer for kids, and land defender, who hails from a pastoral family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that generates the potential to change your viewpoint or trigger some modesty," she adds.

An Homage to Indigenous Heritage

The maze-like structure is part of a features in Sara's immersive art project celebrating the traditions, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number roughly 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They have experienced discrimination, forced assimilation, and suppression of their language by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the work also draws attention to the group's issues relating to the environmental emergency, property rights, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Elements

On the long access incline, there's a towering, 26-metre formation of pelts entangled by electrical wires. It can be read as a metaphor for the societal frameworks constraining the Sámi. Part pylon, part heavenly staircase, this component of the artwork, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, in which solid coatings of ice form as changing conditions liquefy and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' main cold-season food, fungus. This phenomenon is a consequence of global heating, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Far North than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and went with Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they transported carts of supplementary feed on to the barren frozen landscape to provide through labor. The herd crowded round us, digging the icy ground in vain for vegetative bits. This expensive and demanding procedure is having a drastic effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the other option is malnutrition. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—a number from hunger, others drowning after falling into water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the art is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm introducing the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

This artwork also emphasizes the clear contrast between the industrial view of power as a asset to be exploited for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi outlook of life force as an innate power in creatures, people, and the environment. This venue's past as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by Nordic countries. As they strive to be exemplars for clean sources, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the development of wind energy projects, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their traditional territory; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and culture are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to stand your ground when the arguments are grounded in global sustainability," Sara observes. "Extractivism has adopted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but yet it's just attempting to find alternative ways to maintain practices of expenditure."

Personal Challenges

She and her family have themselves clashed with the national administration over its tightening rules on herding. A few years ago, Sara's sibling embarked on a series of finally failed lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara developed a extended set of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a colossal drape of 400 reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the public gallery, where it is displayed in the lobby.

Art as Advocacy

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work is the only realm in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|