🔗 Share this article

Visitors to the renowned gallery are familiar to unexpected encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They've basked under an artificial sun, descended down amusement rides, and witnessed automated jellyfish hovering through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nose chambers of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this huge space—developed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages patrons into a maze-like design based on the expanded inside of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Upon entering, they can wander around or chill out on skins, tuning in on earphones to Sámi elders telling narratives and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It might seem whimsical, but the installation pays tribute to a obscure scientific wonder: scientists have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it breathes in by 80°C, allowing the creature to thrive in extreme Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara notes, "generates a sense of inferiority that you as a human being are not superior over nature." The artist is a ex- journalist, children's author, and land defender, who comes from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that creates the possibility to shift your viewpoint or spark some modesty," she adds.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The labyrinthine design is part of a components in Sara's immersive exhibition celebrating the culture, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number about 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They have faced persecution, forced assimilation, and eradication of their dialect by all four nations. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the installation also draws attention to the community's challenges relating to the global warming, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Materials

Along the long entrance slope, there's a soaring, 26-metre formation of reindeer hides trapped by electrical wires. It represents a symbol for the societal frameworks restricting the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this component of the installation, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which solid sheets of ice develop as changing conditions liquefy and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary winter sustenance, moss. The condition is a outcome of global heating, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Far North than in other regions.

A few years back, I met with Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they transported carts of animal nutrition on to the exposed frozen landscape to provide by hand. The reindeer crowded round us, scratching the frozen ground in futility for mossy bits. This expensive and laborious method is having a severe effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. Yet the choice is malnutrition. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are dying—a number from hunger, others suffocating after plunging into water bodies through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the installation is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

This artwork also highlights the stark contrast between the modern understanding of power as a commodity to be exploited for gain and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of energy as an inherent life force in creatures, people, and the environment. Tate Modern's legacy as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as eco-imperialism by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be standard bearers for sustainable power, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of windfarms, river barriers, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi contend their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and culture are endangered. "It's hard being such a limited population to defend yourself when the reasons are based on environmental protection," Sara notes. "Mining practices has appropriated the rhetoric of ecology, but still it's just striving to find more suitable ways to continue practices of use."

Personal Conflicts

Sara and her relatives have themselves conflicted with the national administration over its increasingly stringent policies on herding. In 2016, Sara's sibling undertook a sequence of unsuccessful legal cases over the required reduction of his animals, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara developed a extended collection of creations named Pile O'Sápmi including a massive curtain of 400 reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the the event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it is displayed in the entryway.

The Role of Art in Awareness

Among the community, creative work appears the sole domain in which they can be listened to by outsiders. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|