Delving into the Scent of Apprehension: Máret Ánne Sara Reimagines The Gallery's Turbine Hall with Reindeer Inspired Installation

Visitors to the renowned gallery are familiar to surprising displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have basked under an artificial sun, glided down amusement rides, and witnessed AI-powered sea creatures drifting through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nose chambers of a reindeer. The latest artistic project for this huge space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a maze-like design based on the expanded inside of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Once inside, they can stroll around or relax on pelts, tuning in on earphones to community leaders imparting tales and insights.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It might sound playful, but the exhibit celebrates a obscure scientific wonder: experts have discovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it inhales by 80°C, allowing the animal to survive in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "creates a sense of inferiority that you as a individual are not superior over nature." She is a ex- writer, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who is from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that fosters the possibility to change your viewpoint or trigger some modesty," she states.

A Tribute to Traditional Ways

The labyrinthine installation is among various elements in Sara's engaging commission honoring the heritage, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number about 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They have faced persecution, integration policies, and eradication of their tongue by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi belief system and founding narrative, the installation also draws attention to the community's struggles relating to the climate crisis, land dispossession, and external control.

Metaphor in Elements

On the lengthy entrance slope, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot sculpture of reindeer hides entangled by electrical wires. It serves as a metaphor for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part heavenly staircase, this part of the exhibit, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby solid layers of ice form as varying conditions melt and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' key cold-season food, fungus. This phenomenon is a result of climate change, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Far North than globally.

A few years back, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi herders on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they carried containers of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to provide by hand. The herd gathered round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain attempts for lichen-covered morsels. This resource-intensive and laborious process is having a drastic influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. However the alternative is malnutrition. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—some from starvation, others submerging after falling into lakes and rivers through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the installation is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

The sculpture also emphasizes the sharp difference between the western interpretation of electricity as a commodity to be harnessed for gain and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an innate essence in creatures, individuals, and the environment. The gallery's history as a coal and oil power station is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by regional governments. While attempting to be exemplars for sustainable power, these states have locked horns with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, river barriers, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi assert their human rights, livelihoods, and traditions are at risk. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the justifications are based on saving the world," Sara comments. "Extractivism has co-opted the discourse of sustainability, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find alternative ways to persist in patterns of consumption."

Personal Challenges

She and her kin have themselves conflicted with the national administration over its ever-stricter rules on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's sibling initiated a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful court actions over the forced culling of his herd, supposedly to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara developed a extended collection of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi including a huge drape of 400 animal bones, which was shown at the the event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the entryway.

Art as Advocacy

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