Delving into this Smell of Apprehension: The Sámi Artist Transforms Tate's Exhibition Space with Arctic Deer Themed Artwork
Guests to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They've basked under an man-made sun, glided down amusement rides, and observed automated sea creatures floating through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nose cavities of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this immense space—developed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a labyrinthine design based on the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Inside, they can meander around or chill out on skins, tuning in on earphones to community leaders sharing narratives and wisdom.
Why the Nose?
Why the nose? It could seem whimsical, but the installation honors a rarely recognized natural marvel: experts have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the surrounding air it breathes in by 80°C, enabling the creature to survive in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "produces a perception of insignificance that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." The artist is a former journalist, young adult author, and environmental activist, who hails from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that fosters the potential to shift your perspective or spark some modesty," she adds.
An Homage to Traditional Ways
The labyrinthine installation is part of a elements in Sara's engaging art project celebrating the culture, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They have faced persecution, forced assimilation, and eradication of their tongue by all four nations. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the installation also spotlights the people's issues associated with the global warming, loss of territory, and imperialism.
Meaning in Materials
At the long entry slope, there's a towering, 26-meter formation of reindeer hides entangled by electrical wires. It represents a analogy for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this section of the installation, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which thick layers of ice appear as fluctuating weather thaw and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary winter sustenance, fungus. Goavvi is a result of climate change, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Far North than globally.
Previously, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and joined Sámi herders on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they carried carts of food pellets on to the barren Arctic plains to distribute by hand. These animals gathered round us, pawing the icy ground in vain for mossy bits. This costly and labour-intensive process is having a significant influence on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. But the other option is starvation. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are dying—some from lack of food, others drowning after sinking in streams through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the installation is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of elements, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.
Contrasting Perspectives
This artwork also emphasizes the sharp contrast between the modern interpretation of power as a commodity to be utilized for gain and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of life force as an innate life force in creatures, humans, and the environment. The gallery's past as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider eco-imperialism by Nordic countries. In their efforts to be exemplars for renewable energy, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, water power facilities, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi contend their human rights, livelihoods, and way of life are threatened. "It's very difficult being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the justifications are grounded in global sustainability," Sara observes. "Extractivism has appropriated the rhetoric of sustainability, but still it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to continue practices of use."
Personal Conflicts
The artist and her family have personally conflicted with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent policies on herding. A few years ago, Sara's sibling undertook a series of finally failed lawsuits over the forced culling of his livestock, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara created a four-year series of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge curtain of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the 2017's art exhibition Documenta 14 and later purchased by the public gallery, where it resides in the entryway.
Art as Advocacy
For numerous Indigenous people, art appears the only sphere in which they can be listened to by outsiders. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|
