Delving into the Smell of Anxiety: The Sámi Artist Reimagines The Gallery's Exhibition Space with Arctic Deer Influenced Artwork

Attendees to the renowned gallery are familiar to unusual displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an man-made sun, glided down helter skelters, and seen robotic jellyfish floating through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nose passages of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this cavernous space—developed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a maze-like design modeled after the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nose passages. Upon entering, they can stroll around or unwind on pelts, listening on earphones to Sámi elders imparting stories and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It may sound playful, but the exhibit pays tribute to a little-known scientific wonder: scientists have found that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it breathes in by 80°C, helping the animal to endure in extreme Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "generates a sense of smallness that you as a person are not dominant over nature." Sara is a ex- reporter, young adult author, and land defender, who hails from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that generates the possibility to change your viewpoint or trigger some humbleness," she states.

A Tribute to Traditional Ways

The labyrinthine design is one of several features in Sara's absorbing exhibition showcasing the culture, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count about 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They have experienced oppression, forced assimilation, and suppression of their dialect by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the work also highlights the people's struggles relating to the global warming, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Components

At the long entrance incline, there's a towering, 26-metre sculpture of skins entangled by power and light cables. It can be read as a metaphor for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this component of the artwork, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, whereby solid layers of ice develop as changing conditions liquefy and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' key winter nourishment, lichen. This phenomenon is a result of climate change, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than in other regions.

A few years back, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they hauled containers of supplementary feed on to the barren Arctic plains to provide through labor. The reindeer crowded round us, digging the icy ground in vain attempts for vegetative pieces. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive process is having a severe influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. Yet the choice is death. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—a number from lack of food, others suffocating after sinking in lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the installation is a monument to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm introducing the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Perspectives

The installation also underscores the sharp contrast between the modern view of energy as a asset to be harnessed for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of life force as an inherent power in creatures, humans, and land. The gallery's history as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be exemplars for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the development of wind energy projects, water power facilities, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their legal protections, ways of life, and culture are threatened. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to stand your ground when the arguments are based on environmental protection," Sara comments. "Mining practices has adopted the rhetoric of ecology, but yet it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to continue practices of consumption."

Family Conflicts

She and her relatives have personally disagreed with the national administration over its tightening regulations on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's brother embarked on a sequence of finally failed court actions over the forced culling of his livestock, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara produced a extended set of creations named Pile O'Sápmi including a massive curtain of 400 animal bones, which was shown at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it resides in the lobby.

The Role of Art in Advocacy

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