🔗 Share this article

Attendees to the renowned gallery are accustomed to surprising experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've basked under an simulated sun, slid down helter skelters, and seen AI-powered jellyfish hovering through the air. But this marks the first time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nasal chambers of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this cavernous space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a maze-like construction based on the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Upon entering, they can stroll around or chill out on reindeer hides, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors imparting narratives and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

Why choose the nasal structure? It could appear quirky, but the exhibit celebrates a rarely recognized natural marvel: scientists have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it inhales by eighty degrees, helping the creature to thrive in extreme Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara explains, "generates a feeling of inferiority that you as a person are not superior over nature." Sara is a former writer, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who hails from a pastoral family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that creates the chance to shift your perspective or trigger some humility," she adds.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The maze-like structure is part of a components in Sara's absorbing commission showcasing the culture, science, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total about 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They have endured discrimination, forced assimilation, and eradication of their dialect by all four nations. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the installation also draws attention to the community's issues relating to the environmental emergency, property rights, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Elements

On the extended entry slope, there's a soaring, 26-metre structure of reindeer hides entangled by power and light cables. It serves as a analogy for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part heavenly staircase, this section of the exhibit, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby thick coatings of ice appear as changing weather liquefy and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' main cold-season food, fungus. Goavvi is a outcome of global heating, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Arctic than elsewhere.

A few years back, I met with Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and accompanied Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they hauled containers of food pellets on to the exposed frozen landscape to provide manually. These animals crowded round us, digging the icy ground in vain attempts for vegetative morsels. This expensive and laborious process is having a severe influence on herding practices—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the other option is death. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are succumbing—some from hunger, others drowning after plunging into streams through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the installation is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of elements, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Perspectives

The sculpture also underscores the sharp difference between the industrial interpretation of power as a asset to be utilized for gain and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an natural life force in animals, people, and nature. Tate Modern's past as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider environmental exploitation by Nordic countries. As they strive to be standard bearers for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have clashed with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi contend their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and way of life are at risk. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to protect your rights when the justifications are rooted in saving the world," Sara observes. "Extractivism has co-opted the rhetoric of ecology, but yet it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to continue habits of consumption."

Family Struggles

The artist and her kin have personally disagreed with the state authorities over its ever-stricter regulations on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's sibling undertook a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the required reduction of his herd, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara created a multi-year set of creations named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal screen of four hundred animal bones, which was displayed at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the lobby.

Creative Expression as Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work is the only sphere in which they can be listened to by outsiders. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|