Exploring the Smell of Fear: The Sámi Artist Reimagines The Gallery's Turbine Hall with Reindeer Themed Exhibit

Guests to the renowned gallery are familiar to unexpected encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an artificial sun, glided down helter skelters, and seen robotic jellyfish hovering through the air. However this marks the first time they will be immersing themselves in the detailed nasal chambers of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this immense space—developed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages patrons into a winding design inspired by the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nasal airways. Once inside, they can stroll around or unwind on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to Sámi elders sharing narratives and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It may seem whimsical, but the installation celebrates a rarely recognized biological feat: scientists have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it inhales by 80 degrees celsius, helping the creature to survive in harsh Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "generates a sense of inferiority that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." The artist is a former journalist, children's author, and land defender, who hails from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Maybe that creates the chance to alter your outlook or spark some humbleness," she adds.

A Celebration to Indigenous Heritage

The labyrinthine installation is one of several elements in Sara's absorbing art project showcasing the culture, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They've endured persecution, integration policies, and repression of their tongue by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the art also highlights the group's issues relating to the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Elements

Along the lengthy entrance ramp, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot formation of pelts trapped by electrical wires. It represents a analogy for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this component of the artwork, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, wherein dense sheets of ice develop as fluctuating conditions liquefy and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' key cold-season sustenance, fungus. Goavvi is a result of global heating, which is happening up to four times faster in the Far North than globally.

A few years back, I met with Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they hauled trailers of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to distribute manually. These animals surrounded round us, scratching the slippery ground in vain for mossy morsels. This expensive and labour-intensive procedure is having a significant effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. However the other option is malnutrition. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are perishing—some from hunger, others drowning after falling into water bodies through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the art is a monument to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

The sculpture also highlights the sharp difference between the industrial view of electricity as a resource to be exploited for profit and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an natural power in animals, people, and nature. The gallery's legacy as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be standard bearers for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and mines on their traditional territory; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, livelihoods, and culture are endangered. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to stand your ground when the justifications are grounded in global sustainability," Sara observes. "Mining practices has appropriated the language of sustainability, but yet it's just attempting to find alternative ways to persist in habits of consumption."

Individual Conflicts

Sara and her relatives have personally conflicted with the national administration over its ever-stricter policies on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's brother undertook a set of unsuccessful court actions over the forced culling of his herd, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara developed a four-year collection of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal screen of numerous animal bones, which was shown at the the event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the entrance.

Art as Advocacy

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work seems the exclusive sphere in which they can be understood by people of other nations. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|