Delving into this Smell of Anxiety: Máret Ánne Sara Transforms The Gallery's Exhibition Space with Arctic Deer Themed Exhibit

Guests to the renowned gallery are familiar to surprising displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an man-made sun, glided down amusement rides, and witnessed robotic sea creatures hovering through the air. But this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the complex nose cavities of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this cavernous space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages patrons into a winding structure inspired by the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose cavities. Inside, they can wander around or unwind on skins, listening on headphones to Sámi elders sharing stories and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It could appear whimsical, but the installation pays tribute to a rarely recognized scientific wonder: researchers have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it breathes in by 80 degrees celsius, helping the animal to endure in inhospitable Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "creates a perception of smallness that you as a person are not in control over nature." The artist is a former reporter, children's author, and environmental activist, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that creates the potential to shift your outlook or evoke some humility," she adds.

A Tribute to Traditional Ways

The maze-like structure is one of several components in Sara's absorbing exhibition celebrating the heritage, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They've faced oppression, integration policies, and suppression of their dialect by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the art also spotlights the community's struggles connected to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Meaning in Elements

On the lengthy access ramp, there's a soaring, 26-meter structure of pelts ensnared by electrical wires. It represents a metaphor for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this part of the exhibit, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which dense layers of ice develop as changing conditions melt and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary winter sustenance, lichen. The condition is a outcome of global heating, which is taking place up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than globally.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they hauled trailers of animal nutrition on to the barren Arctic plains to dispense through labor. The reindeer crowded round us, pawing the frozen ground in vain for mossy bits. This resource-intensive and demanding method is having a significant influence on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the other option is death. As goavvi winters become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—a number from hunger, others submerging after falling into streams through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the art is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

The installation also emphasizes the sharp contrast between the modern understanding of energy as a commodity to be harnessed for gain and survival and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an inherent power in creatures, individuals, and land. The gallery's history as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be exemplars for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, river barriers, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi argue their human rights, livelihoods, and traditions are threatened. "It's very difficult being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the reasons are grounded in environmental protection," Sara observes. "Extractivism has appropriated the rhetoric of sustainability, but yet it's just aiming to find alternative ways to persist in habits of expenditure."

Family Challenges

The artist and her relatives have themselves disagreed with the state authorities over its increasingly stringent rules on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's sibling embarked on a set of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, apparently to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara produced a multi-year series of creations named Pile O'Sápmi including a huge screen of 400 cranial remains, which was displayed at the 2017 event Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it is displayed in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Activism

For many Sámi, creative work seems the sole domain in which they can be understood by the global community. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|