Unveiling this Aroma of Anxiety: Máret Ánne Sara Transforms The Gallery's Turbine Hall with Arctic Deer Inspired Artwork

Attendees to Tate Modern are familiar to surprising encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an artificial sun, descended down spiral slides, and witnessed robotic jellyfish floating through the air. But this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the complex nose passages of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a maze-like design modeled after the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Inside, they can meander around or chill out on pelts, tuning in on earphones to community leaders imparting tales and insights.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It might sound playful, but the artwork pays tribute to a rarely recognized natural marvel: researchers have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it takes in by eighty degrees, helping the animal to thrive in harsh Arctic conditions. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "creates a perception of inferiority that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." Sara is a former writer, children's author, and rights advocate, who hails from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Possibly that fosters the potential to shift your viewpoint or trigger some humbleness," she continues.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The winding structure is one of several elements in Sara's engaging commission honoring the heritage, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They've faced persecution, cultural suppression, and suppression of their language by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the installation also highlights the people's challenges associated with the global warming, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Meaning in Components

At the lengthy entry incline, there's a soaring, 26-metre formation of skins entangled by electrical wires. It represents a symbol for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Part pylon, part heavenly staircase, this part of the artwork, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein dense layers of ice appear as varying conditions melt and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' primary winter food, fungus. The condition is a consequence of climate change, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than elsewhere.

A few years back, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and went with Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they hauled carts of animal nutrition on to the exposed tundra to dispense manually. The reindeer gathered round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain attempts for lichen-covered morsels. This expensive and labour-intensive method is having a drastic influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. But the other option is starvation. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are perishing—some from starvation, others suffocating after plunging into lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the art is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of elements, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

This artwork also underscores the clear contrast between the modern understanding of power as a commodity to be harnessed for gain and existence and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an inherent essence in animals, humans, and nature. The gallery's legacy as a fossil fuel plant is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be standard bearers for clean sources, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, water power facilities, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, livelihoods, and way of life are threatened. "It's hard being such a limited population to defend yourself when the reasons are rooted in environmental protection," Sara comments. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the rhetoric of sustainability, but yet it's just aiming to find better ways to persist in habits of expenditure."

Family Struggles

Sara and her kin have personally disagreed with the national administration over its tightening rules on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's sibling undertook a series of unsuccessful lawsuits over the required reduction of his livestock, supposedly to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara created a four-year collection of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge screen of numerous reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it resides in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For many Sámi, creative work appears the exclusive sphere in which they can be understood by outsiders. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|