Delving into this Smell of Fear: The Sámi Artist Revamps The Gallery's Exhibition Space with Reindeer Influenced Artwork

Visitors to the renowned gallery are used to surprising encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an simulated sun, glided down spiral slides, and witnessed automated sea creatures hovering through the air. But this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nose passages of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this cavernous space—designed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a labyrinthine construction modeled after the expanded inside of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Once inside, they can meander around or relax on reindeer hides, tuning in on earphones to tribal seniors telling stories and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It might seem quirky, but the exhibit celebrates a rarely recognized biological feat: experts have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it takes in by eighty degrees, helping the creature to endure in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "creates a feeling of smallness that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." The artist is a former journalist, writer for kids, and land defender, who comes from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that creates the potential to alter your outlook or evoke some humility," she continues.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The labyrinthine installation is among various features in Sara's immersive commission showcasing the heritage, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They have endured discrimination, integration policies, and eradication of their dialect by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the work also spotlights the people's struggles relating to the global warming, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Components

Along the long entry slope, there's a soaring, 26-meter formation of skins ensnared by utility lines. It represents a symbol for the societal frameworks restricting the Sámi. Part pylon, part spiritual ascent, this section of the artwork, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which dense sheets of ice form as varying weather melt and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' main winter sustenance, moss. This phenomenon is a result of climate change, which is happening up to four times faster in the Polar region than globally.

Previously, I visited Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and joined Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they transported containers of food pellets on to the wind-scoured tundra to dispense manually. These animals surrounded round us, pawing the frozen ground in vain attempts for vegetative bits. This expensive and laborious process is having a drastic influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. But the alternative is malnutrition. As these icy periods become frequent, reindeer are dying—some from lack of food, others submerging after sinking in streams through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the installation is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

The installation also emphasizes the sharp contrast between the western interpretation of power as a resource to be utilized for gain and survival and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an innate essence in animals, people, and land. The gallery's past as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be leaders for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, river barriers, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their human rights, incomes, and way of life are threatened. "It's challenging being such a small minority to stand your ground when the justifications are based on saving the world," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the discourse of sustainability, but nonetheless it's just striving to find more suitable ways to maintain patterns of consumption."

Family Struggles

The artist and her kin have personally conflicted with the national administration over its tightening regulations on herding. Previously, Sara's brother embarked on a series of unsuccessful court actions over the forced culling of his livestock, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a multi-year set of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal drape of four hundred animal bones, which was displayed at the the event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the entryway.

Art as Advocacy

For many Sámi, art appears the only realm in which they can be heard by the global community. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|