Unveiling this Scent of Anxiety: Máret Ánne Sara Transforms The Gallery's Exhibition Space with Reindeer Influenced Artwork

Guests to the renowned gallery are accustomed to unexpected experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an artificial sun, glided down helter skelters, and seen robotic jellyfish drifting through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be venturing themselves in the complex nose chambers of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this huge space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a maze-like design based on the expanded inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Upon entering, they can meander around or chill out on skins, listening on earphones to Sámi elders telling stories and insights.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why choose the nasal structure? It could sound whimsical, but the exhibit celebrates a rarely recognized natural marvel: experts have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it inhales by eighty degrees, enabling the creature to endure in harsh Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "generates a sense of inferiority that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." The artist is a ex- journalist, children's author, and rights advocate, who comes from a herding family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that fosters the chance to change your viewpoint or spark some humility," she continues.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The winding design is among various features in Sara's absorbing commission celebrating the traditions, knowledge, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They have endured discrimination, integration policies, and eradication of their tongue by all four states. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the installation also highlights the community's struggles associated with the environmental emergency, property rights, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Components

At the long access slope, there's a towering, 26-metre sculpture of reindeer hides trapped by utility lines. It represents a symbol for the societal frameworks restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this section of the exhibit, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, whereby dense layers of ice develop as changing temperatures liquefy and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' key winter food, fungus. This phenomenon is a result of global heating, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than globally.

A few years back, I met with Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and went with Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they hauled carts of food pellets on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to distribute through labor. The herd gathered round us, scratching the frozen ground in vain for vegetative pieces. This costly and demanding process is having a drastic impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. Yet the choice is malnutrition. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are succumbing—some from lack of food, others suffocating after falling into lakes and rivers through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the installation is a tribute to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm introducing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

The sculpture also emphasizes the sharp divergence between the western interpretation of energy as a asset to be harnessed for gain and survival and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an innate life force in animals, people, and nature. This venue's past as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by Nordic countries. As they strive to be leaders for renewable energy, these states have locked horns with the Sámi over the development of windfarms, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi argue their legal protections, incomes, and traditions are at risk. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to defend yourself when the reasons are based on global sustainability," Sara observes. "Extractivism has co-opted the discourse of environmentalism, but still it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to persist in habits of use."

Personal Challenges

Sara and her kin have themselves clashed with the state authorities over its ever-stricter regulations on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's sibling undertook a set of unsuccessful lawsuits over the forced culling of his herd, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara produced a multi-year collection of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a colossal drape of numerous reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the national institution, where it hangs in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

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