Exploring the Scent of Anxiety: The Sámi Artist Revamps The Gallery's Exhibition Space with Arctic Deer Inspired Artwork

Visitors to the renowned gallery are familiar to surprising experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an artificial sun, descended down helter skelters, and observed robotic sea creatures hovering through the air. Yet this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the complex nasal passages of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this cavernous space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a maze-like structure inspired by the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Upon entering, they can meander around or chill out on skins, listening on headphones to tribal seniors imparting stories and insights.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why choose the nasal structure? It may sound playful, but the installation honors a rarely recognized scientific wonder: scientists have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the ambient air it breathes in by 80 degrees celsius, allowing the animal to survive in extreme Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "generates a perception of smallness that you as a individual are not in control over nature." Sara is a ex- journalist, children's author, and environmental activist, who hails from a pastoral family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that generates the potential to shift your outlook or evoke some humility," she adds.

A Tribute to Traditional Ways

The winding design is among various elements in Sara's immersive commission showcasing the culture, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count about 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They've faced oppression, forced assimilation, and suppression of their dialect by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the art also spotlights the community's struggles associated with the global warming, loss of territory, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Components

At the long entrance slope, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot formation of pelts trapped by electrical wires. It represents a analogy for the societal frameworks constraining the Sámi. Part pylon, part heavenly staircase, this section of the installation, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi name for an harsh environmental condition, wherein thick layers of ice form as changing conditions melt and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' main cold-season nourishment, lichen. This phenomenon is a outcome of climate change, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than globally.

Previously, I traveled to see Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they transported containers of food pellets on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to dispense manually. These animals crowded round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain attempts for lichen-covered bits. This resource-intensive and demanding procedure is having a drastic influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the alternative is malnutrition. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are dying—a number from starvation, others suffocating after falling into water bodies through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the art is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

The installation also emphasizes the clear contrast between the modern understanding of power as a commodity to be exploited for gain and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an inherent power in creatures, people, and the environment. The gallery's legacy as a coal and oil power station is connected to this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by regional governments. As they strive to be exemplars for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of windfarms, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their traditional territory; the Sámi contend their human rights, ways of life, and traditions are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to protect your rights when the arguments are based on environmental protection," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the rhetoric of sustainability, but nonetheless it's just attempting to find alternative ways to maintain practices of expenditure."

Individual Struggles

Sara and her family have personally clashed with the national administration over its tightening regulations on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's brother initiated a set of ultimately unsuccessful court actions over the required reduction of his herd, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a extended series of creations called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive drape of four hundred cranial remains, which was exhibited at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it resides in the entryway.

Art as Activism

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