Delving into the Smell of Fear: The Sámi Artist Transforms The Gallery's Turbine Hall with Arctic Deer Inspired Artwork
Visitors to Tate Modern are accustomed to unusual experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an man-made sun, slid down spiral slides, and witnessed automated sea creatures floating through the air. But this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nose cavities of a reindeer. The current artist commission for this huge space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a labyrinthine design inspired by the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Upon entering, they can wander around or relax on reindeer hides, tuning in on earphones to tribal seniors imparting tales and knowledge.
Focus on the Nasal Passages
What's the focus on the nose? It may sound playful, but the exhibit celebrates a obscure scientific wonder: researchers have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it inhales by 80°C, helping the creature to endure in harsh Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "generates a perception of insignificance that you as a individual are not superior over nature." Sara is a ex- journalist, writer for kids, and environmental activist, who comes from a pastoral family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that generates the potential to alter your perspective or evoke some modesty," she continues.
A Tribute to Sámi Culture
The winding installation is one of several features in Sara's immersive art project showcasing the culture, science, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number roughly 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They've endured oppression, cultural suppression, and suppression of their language by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the work also spotlights the community's challenges associated with the global warming, loss of territory, and external control.
Meaning in Components
On the lengthy access ramp, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot sculpture of pelts entangled by utility lines. It can be read as a symbol for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part heavenly staircase, this part of the artwork, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an severe climatic event, wherein dense layers of ice develop as varying temperatures melt and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' key cold-season sustenance, fungus. Goavvi is a consequence of global heating, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Polar region than globally.
A few years back, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they carried carts of supplementary feed on to the exposed Arctic plains to dispense manually. The herd crowded round us, scratching the icy ground in vain for mossy bits. This expensive and demanding method is having a severe impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. But the alternative is malnutrition. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are dying—some from hunger, others submerging after plunging into lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the art is a monument to them. "With the layering of materials, in a way I'm introducing the goavvi to London," says Sara.
Opposing Belief Systems
The sculpture also emphasizes the clear difference between the industrial interpretation of electricity as a asset to be utilized for gain and survival and the Sámi outlook of life force as an innate life force in creatures, individuals, and land. Tate Modern's history as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be leaders for clean sources, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their traditional territory; the Sámi contend their human rights, incomes, and culture are at risk. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to protect your rights when the justifications are grounded in global sustainability," Sara notes. "Mining practices has co-opted the rhetoric of ecology, but yet it's just attempting to find alternative ways to continue patterns of expenditure."
Family Challenges
The artist and her kin have personally clashed with the national administration over its ever-stricter rules on herding. In 2016, Sara's brother embarked on a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara produced a extended series of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a colossal curtain of numerous reindeer skulls, which was shown at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the national institution, where it resides in the entryway.
Art as Advocacy
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