Unveiling this Aroma of Anxiety: Máret Ánne Sara Revamps Tate's Turbine Hall with Reindeer Inspired Installation

Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have basked under an simulated sun, slid down spiral slides, and witnessed robotic sea creatures drifting through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the detailed nasal passages of a reindeer. The current artist commission for this cavernous space—developed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a maze-like design inspired by the expanded inside of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Once inside, they can stroll around or relax on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to community leaders imparting tales and wisdom.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It may seem playful, but the installation pays tribute to a obscure natural marvel: experts have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it breathes in by 80°C, enabling the animal to thrive in harsh Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "produces a feeling of insignificance that you as a person are not dominant over nature." Sara is a former writer, children's author, and rights advocate, who comes from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that creates the potential to alter your perspective or evoke some humbleness," she continues.

A Tribute to Indigenous Heritage

The maze-like design is part of a features in Sara's immersive commission showcasing the heritage, understanding, and philosophy of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total about 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They've experienced discrimination, cultural suppression, and suppression of their language by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the art also draws attention to the group's struggles connected to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and external control.

Symbolism in Materials

Along the long entry ramp, there's a soaring, 26-metre structure of skins entangled by electrical wires. It serves as a analogy for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this part of the installation, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an severe climatic event, wherein solid layers of ice form as changing temperatures liquefy and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' main cold-season nourishment, fungus. Goavvi is a outcome of climate change, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than in other regions.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they transported trailers of food pellets on to the wind-scoured tundra to dispense manually. The reindeer surrounded round us, scratching the frozen ground in vain attempts for mossy pieces. This expensive and laborious procedure is having a drastic impact on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the choice is malnutrition. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are perishing—a number from starvation, others drowning after plunging into water bodies through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the installation is a tribute to them. "With the layering of elements, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

The installation also highlights the clear divergence between the industrial view of energy as a commodity to be utilized for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an innate life force in animals, humans, and land. This venue's legacy as a fossil fuel plant is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by Nordic countries. As they strive to be standard bearers for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have clashed with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi argue their legal protections, ways of life, and culture are threatened. "It's hard being such a limited population to protect your rights when the reasons are rooted in saving the world," Sara comments. "Extractivism has adopted the language of environmentalism, but yet it's just attempting to find alternative ways to continue habits of use."

Personal Challenges

Sara and her relatives have personally disagreed with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent regulations on animal husbandry. Previously, Sara's sibling initiated a sequence of unsuccessful court actions over the required reduction of his livestock, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara created a four-year collection of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi including a massive curtain of 400 animal bones, which was displayed at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it hangs in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

For numerous Indigenous people, visual expression is the only realm in which they can be heard by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|