Delving into the Smell of Apprehension: The Sámi Artist Revamps The Gallery's Turbine Hall with Reindeer Inspired Exhibit

Visitors to the renowned gallery are used to unusual encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an man-made sun, slid down spiral slides, and witnessed robotic jellyfish drifting through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The newest artistic project for this immense space—developed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a maze-like construction modeled after the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Inside, they can meander around or chill out on skins, tuning in on earphones to tribal seniors imparting stories and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It may appear whimsical, but the exhibit honors a little-known scientific wonder: scientists have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the ambient air it breathes in by eighty degrees, enabling the creature to thrive in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara notes, "generates a feeling of smallness that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." Sara is a ex- writer, children's author, and rights advocate, who is from a reindeer-herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Maybe that generates the chance to change your perspective or trigger some humility," she states.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The labyrinthine design is one of several elements in Sara's immersive art project celebrating the traditions, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Partially migratory, the Sámi number roughly 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They have endured discrimination, forced assimilation, and repression of their language by all four states. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the work also spotlights the community's challenges connected to the climate crisis, property rights, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Elements

On the lengthy access incline, there's a looming, 26-meter formation of reindeer hides trapped by power and light cables. It serves as a analogy for the societal frameworks restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this component of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, in which thick layers of ice form as fluctuating conditions melt and ice over the snow, locking in the reindeers' key cold-season nourishment, fungus. This phenomenon is a outcome of global heating, which is happening up to four times faster in the Far North than in other regions.

A few years back, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in freezing temperatures as they carried trailers of animal nutrition on to the exposed Arctic plains to provide manually. The reindeer crowded round us, digging the frozen ground in futility for vegetative morsels. This costly and labour-intensive process is having a significant effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. However the alternative is starvation. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are succumbing—some from starvation, others drowning after sinking in streams through unstable frozen surfaces. In a sense, the work is a monument to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm introducing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

This artwork also underscores the sharp divergence between the modern interpretation of electricity as a resource to be harnessed for gain and survival and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an inherent life force in animals, individuals, and nature. This venue's legacy as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be standard bearers for sustainable power, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of wind energy projects, water power facilities, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and traditions are at risk. "It's challenging being such a small minority to defend yourself when the arguments are grounded in environmental protection," Sara comments. "Mining practices has appropriated the language of ecology, but still it's just striving to find better ways to continue habits of expenditure."

Personal Conflicts

She and her family have personally conflicted with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent policies on herding. Previously, Sara's sibling initiated a series of unsuccessful legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a multi-year set of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi including a massive screen of four hundred animal bones, which was shown at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the lobby.

Creative Expression as Activism

For many Sámi, art is the exclusive realm in which they can be heard by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|