Delving into the Scent of Anxiety: The Sámi Artist Transforms The Gallery's Exhibition Space with Arctic Deer Inspired Exhibit
Visitors to Tate Modern are used to unexpected experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They have basked under an artificial sun, descended down helter skelters, and observed AI-powered sea creatures floating through the air. However this marks the first time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nasal passages of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this huge space—developed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a labyrinthine construction based on the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Inside, they can wander around or relax on pelts, listening on earphones to Sámi elders sharing narratives and wisdom.
Why the Nose?
Why the nose? It may sound quirky, but the installation honors a little-known biological feat: researchers have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the surrounding air it takes in by eighty degrees, helping the animal to survive in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "generates a feeling of insignificance that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." The artist is a ex- writer, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Maybe that fosters the possibility to change your viewpoint or evoke some humility," she states.
A Tribute to Indigenous Heritage
The maze-like installation is one of several components in Sara's engaging commission showcasing the traditions, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They have endured persecution, cultural suppression, and suppression of their tongue by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the work also draws attention to the group's issues associated with the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and external control.
Meaning in Elements
Along the lengthy entry incline, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot sculpture of pelts entangled by electrical wires. It represents a analogy for the societal frameworks restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part heavenly staircase, this part of the exhibit, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, wherein thick sheets of ice develop as varying weather liquefy and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary cold-season sustenance, fungus. This phenomenon is a consequence of global heating, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Far North than globally.
Three years ago, I met with Sara in a remote town during a icy season and joined Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they hauled containers of animal nutrition on to the barren Arctic plains to distribute by hand. These animals surrounded round us, scratching the frozen ground in futility for vegetative bits. This costly and laborious process is having a drastic influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. However the other option is death. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—some from lack of food, others suffocating after plunging into water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the art is a memorial to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.
Diverging Belief Systems
The installation also emphasizes the clear difference between the industrial interpretation of electricity as a asset to be exploited for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an innate life force in animals, humans, and the environment. Tate Modern's past as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by regional governments. In their efforts to be exemplars for sustainable power, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and traditions are at risk. "It's very difficult being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the reasons are grounded in environmental protection," Sara observes. "Mining practices has appropriated the discourse of ecology, but nonetheless it's just striving to find better ways to continue patterns of consumption."
Individual Struggles
Sara and her kin have themselves disagreed with the state authorities over its tightening policies on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's sibling embarked on a sequence of unsuccessful court actions over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, apparently to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara developed a four-year collection of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal screen of four hundred animal bones, which was exhibited at the the event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it is displayed in the entrance.
The Role of Art in Awareness
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