Rooted in Breath: Máret Ánne Sara for Tate Modern’s Hyundai Commission
- Anna Buriak
- Oct 18
- 4 min read
Anna Buriak
Entering the Turbine Hall, one expects spectacle: vast scale, cinematic intervention, sensory surprise. But in “Hyundai Commission: Máret Ánne Sara: Goavve-Geabbil,” the spectacle is measured, even restrained, and it asks you to slow down. You do not immediately grasp this as a “blockbuster,” but rather as a challenge, a call to attunement. And that is in many ways the project’s strongest move.
From the south end of the hall the monumental vertical column Goavve rises 28 metres, composed of reindeer hides bound in black electrical cables. The hides themselves carry a weight of cultural resonance, drawn from Sámi reindeer herding practices. Bound by industrial ribbon, the work implicates modernity’s webs of energy, infrastructure and extraction. The cables and the height encourage the gaze to climb, drawing you into a tension: ancestral matter pressed into modern systems.
This upward movement is counterbalanced by the east side’s Geabbil, a labyrinthine structure derived from the internal anatomy of the reindeer’s nasal cavity. Walking its carved wooden corridors, you move slowly, encountering pockets of audio, scent, and pause. The maze, in effect, collapses scale: the giant Goavve commands architectural volume, but Geabbil draws you inward, toward bodily proportions and experience.
At its best, Goavve-Geabbil functions as a double allegory: the column evokes a sense of death, absence, sacrifice; the maze invites reorientation, humility, and listening. In this duality, Sara creates a poetic counterpoint to the Turbine Hall’s own history. Once an oil and coal power station, the building stands as a monument to fossil energy, industrial extraction, and the ambitions of high modernity. The artist invites viewers instead to think of energy not merely as resource but also in relation to how life circulates, how land breathes, how knowledge is embodied.
One views in her work resonance with other large-scale public commissions that embed ecological weight. For instance, Olafur Eliasson’s Ice Watch (2014), where glacial blocks sat in public spaces; or Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973-76), where human movement is aligned to celestial phenomena. But Sara’s pivot is important: the gaze is not outward to cosmic scale but inward to relational systems – how humans, animals, land, scent, and sound articulate a shared topology. In this sense, the work aligns as much with Indigenous philosophy as with environmental art.
The material approach is compelling: hides, bones, wood, cable are all materials with life histories. Sara imbues the hides with scent, drawing on the Sámi concept of váivahuvvon hádja (the odour of fear or distress in reindeer). That nonverbal communication is one of the more daring gestures here that asks the viewer to reconnect with their sense of smell as a way of knowing. The audio environment combines Sápmi field recordings, joik singing, and oral testimonies from elders, resonating with the voices of the land itself. In the carved poles are reindeer earmarks, which are unique patterns passed down through Sámi families and herding groups: symbolic codes of belonging, lineage, and responsibility.
Yet at times, the work’s ambition feels slightly overwhelming. The towering scale of Goavve can draw so much attention that it risks eclipsing the quieter, more intimate experience of Geabbil. While the height of the column is meant to place Sámi cosmology within the language of monumental public art, its grandeur can also create distance rather than connection. The sculpture instantly catches the eye, but it does not always hold it; many visitors may look up, admire its size, and then move quickly on to the maze, missing the deeper links between the two parts of the installation.
Moreover, while the sensory design is rich, the transitions between zones sometimes feel abrupt. Entering Geabbil from the monumental space of the Turbine Hall, you cross from industrial volume into enclosed intimacy, but some passages remain dim or disorienting and not in an intentional way. At times, the soundscape also competes with the background noise of the building itself: the mechanical hums of the old power station seeps through, and the artwork has to fight to be heard.
This tension between signal and noise extends beyond acoustics. It echoes Sara’s engagement with the broader struggle between Indigenous knowledge (the signal) and the dominant modern or industrial frameworks that drowned it out (the noise). Sara’s focus on Indigenous knowledge, reciprocity, and interconnected ways of thinking feels especially timely. She asks us to see energy not as something to extract or own, but as a sacred life force that sustains all beings, a perspective that challenges how we usually talk about climate and power. Goavve-Geabbil becomes a philosophical question: can we relearn how to live in balance with the world around us?
For some viewers the work will feel opaque or too reliant on prior knowledge of Sámi ideas and symbols. But art does not always have to be instantly digestible. Sara’s ambition is that we listen differently, through smell, story, and stillness, and that we move beyond our usual, image-driven ways of seeing. She opens a space that sits between monument and meditation, between taking and giving back.
Most Turbine Hall commissions, such as by artists like Mire Lee, Kara Walker, Olafur Eliasson, or Doris Salcedo, have aimed for visual spectacle. Sara’s standard is different, and is embodied in endurance, attention, reflection. Her work does not ask us to be impressed, it invites us to stay, to breathe, to listen. That is a risk. Some will skim, turn and leave. But others will slow and be changed.
In an age when conversations about the environment are full of urgency and technology, Goavve-Geabbil slows the pace. It offers a space to pause, to sense loss and resilience, to share grief for what is disappearing. It doesn’t offer solutions but a chance to remember how to live in relation again. In doing so, Máret Ánne Sara offers more than art: she offers an invitation back into relational life.
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I think Sara’s installation is powerful because it doesn’t try to impress with size alone but makes you slow down and feel. It reminds us that art can be a way to reconnect with nature and our own senses. Retro Bowl College