Exploring the Smell of Anxiety: Máret Ánne Sara Transforms Tate's Exhibition Space with Reindeer Influenced Exhibit

Guests to the renowned gallery are accustomed to unexpected encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an artificial sun, glided down helter skelters, and witnessed AI-powered sea creatures hovering through the air. But this marks the inaugural time they will be immersing themselves in the complex nose chambers of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this huge space—developed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a maze-like construction based on the expanded inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Inside, they can meander around or relax on skins, listening on headphones to tribal seniors imparting stories and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It might appear playful, but the exhibit celebrates a rarely recognized scientific wonder: experts have discovered 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 creature to thrive in harsh Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "produces a feeling of inferiority that you as a human being are not superior over nature." Sara is a ex- writer, children's author, and land defender, who hails from a herding family in northern Norway. "Possibly that fosters the potential to shift your outlook or spark some humbleness," she states.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The maze-like installation is one of several features in Sara's engaging commission celebrating the traditions, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They have endured oppression, integration policies, and suppression of their dialect by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the art also highlights the group's struggles connected to the environmental emergency, property rights, and imperialism.

Meaning in Components

At the long entrance incline, there's a looming, 26-metre sculpture of skins entangled by utility lines. It represents a symbol for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this section of the exhibit, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which dense coatings of ice develop as changing conditions liquefy and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' main cold-season nourishment, lichen. The condition is a consequence of climate change, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Far North than elsewhere.

Previously, I traveled to see Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi herders on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they hauled carts of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured tundra to distribute manually. The herd crowded round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain for lichen-covered morsels. This expensive and labour-intensive procedure is having a drastic influence on herding practices—and on the animals' natural survival. However the choice is malnutrition. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—some from lack of food, others drowning after plunging into lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the art is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

This artwork also underscores the sharp contrast between the industrial view of power as a commodity to be harnessed for gain and survival and the Sámi outlook of life force as an innate life force in creatures, individuals, and the environment. This venue's past as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be leaders for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their legal protections, ways of life, and traditions are threatened. "It's challenging being such a small minority to defend yourself when the reasons are rooted in global sustainability," Sara comments. "Extractivism has appropriated the language of sustainability, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to continue practices of expenditure."

Personal Struggles

She and her family have personally disagreed with the state authorities over its increasingly stringent rules on herding. Previously, Sara's sibling embarked on a series of finally failed legal cases over the required reduction of his herd, supposedly to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara produced a multi-year series of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge curtain of numerous reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work appears the exclusive domain in which they can be understood by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|