Unveiling this Smell of Fear: Máret Ánne Sara Revamps The Gallery's Exhibition Space with Reindeer Themed Artwork

Visitors to the renowned gallery are familiar to unexpected encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've basked under an artificial sun, descended down spiral slides, and observed AI-powered jellyfish drifting through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nasal passages of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this huge space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a maze-like structure inspired by the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nasal airways. Inside, they can meander around or relax on pelts, tuning in on earphones to Sámi elders telling stories and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It could appear whimsical, but the artwork pays tribute to a little-known natural marvel: researchers have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the ambient air it inhales by eighty degrees, enabling the animal to endure in harsh Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "generates a perception of inferiority that you as a person are not superior over nature." She is a former writer, children's author, and environmental activist, who is from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that creates the potential to change your viewpoint or spark some modesty," she adds.

A Celebration to Indigenous Heritage

The labyrinthine installation is one of several components in Sara's immersive commission honoring the traditions, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They have experienced discrimination, forced assimilation, and suppression of their tongue by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the work also highlights the community's struggles connected to the climate crisis, loss of territory, and colonialism.

Meaning in Components

At the long entrance slope, there's a soaring, 26-metre sculpture of skins entangled by utility lines. It can be read as a analogy for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part spiritual ascent, this section of the exhibit, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, in which solid sheets of ice appear as varying temperatures liquefy and ice over the snow, locking in the reindeers' key cold-season food, lichen. Goavvi is a result of planetary warming, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than in other regions.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and joined Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they transported carts of supplementary feed on to the barren tundra to dispense manually. The herd crowded round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain attempts for vegetative bits. This resource-intensive and laborious process is having a significant effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. Yet the alternative is starvation. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—a number from hunger, others submerging after falling into lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the art is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

This artwork also highlights the sharp divergence between the western view of electricity as a resource to be exploited for profit and existence and the Sámi worldview of energy as an inherent life force in creatures, individuals, and nature. This venue's past as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be exemplars for sustainable power, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi contend their human rights, livelihoods, and way of life are endangered. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to protect your rights when the justifications are grounded in global sustainability," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has adopted the rhetoric of ecology, but nonetheless it's just attempting to find better ways to continue habits of expenditure."

Personal Struggles

Sara and her kin have personally conflicted with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter regulations on herding. In 2016, Sara's sibling initiated a set of finally failed lawsuits over the required reduction of his animals, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara developed a multi-year series of creations called Pile O'Sápmi including a massive screen of numerous reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the 2017 event Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the lobby.

The Role of Art in Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work is the sole realm in which they can be heard by people of other nations. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|