Delving into the Scent of Anxiety: The Sámi Artist Transforms The Gallery's Exhibition Space with Reindeer Inspired Artwork
Attendees to Tate Modern are familiar to surprising displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have basked under an man-made sun, glided down amusement rides, and observed robotic sea creatures floating through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nose chambers of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this immense space—created by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a winding design inspired by the expanded inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Inside, they can meander around or unwind on reindeer hides, tuning in on earphones to community leaders sharing tales and insights.
Why the Nose?
What's the focus on the nose? It might sound playful, but the installation pays tribute to a little-known biological feat: researchers have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it takes in by eighty degrees, helping the animal to survive in harsh Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "creates a feeling of inferiority that you as a human being are not superior over nature." She is a former writer, young adult author, and land defender, who hails from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Possibly that creates the potential to alter your perspective or trigger some humility," she states.
A Celebration to Indigenous Heritage
The labyrinthine structure is among various elements in Sara's absorbing exhibition honoring the culture, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They've experienced discrimination, cultural suppression, and suppression of their language by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the art also highlights the community's challenges associated with the climate crisis, property rights, and colonialism.
Meaning in Components
Along the extended access ramp, there's a soaring, 26-metre sculpture of pelts entangled by utility lines. It can be read as a analogy for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this part of the artwork, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, whereby thick layers of ice appear as varying conditions liquefy and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary winter nourishment, lichen. Goavvi is a outcome of climate change, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than elsewhere.
A few years back, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and joined Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they transported carts of supplementary feed on to the exposed Arctic plains to distribute manually. These animals crowded round us, pawing the icy ground in vain attempts for vegetative bits. This costly and demanding process is having a drastic effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the other option is malnutrition. As these icy periods become frequent, reindeer are perishing—some from lack of food, others drowning after falling into streams through unstable frozen surfaces. In a sense, the work is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.
Opposing Worldviews
The sculpture also emphasizes the stark contrast between the industrial interpretation of energy as a asset to be exploited for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of life force as an natural essence in creatures, humans, and nature. Tate Modern's past as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be standard bearers for sustainable power, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their legal protections, incomes, and way of life are threatened. "It's hard being such a small minority to protect your rights when the arguments are based on global sustainability," Sara comments. "Mining practices has appropriated the language of ecology, but still it's just attempting to find better ways to maintain patterns of use."
Personal Struggles
She and her kin have themselves conflicted with the national administration over its increasingly stringent policies on herding. A few years ago, Sara's sibling initiated a set of unsuccessful court actions over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a multi-year set of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal drape of four hundred cranial remains, which was shown at the 2017 event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it resides in the lobby.
Art as Awareness
For numerous Indigenous people, visual expression seems the exclusive domain in which they can be heard by outsiders. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|
