🔗 Share this article

Guests to the renowned gallery are familiar to unusual displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They have basked under an man-made sun, glided down helter skelters, and observed AI-powered jellyfish floating through the air. But this marks the first time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The newest artistic project for this cavernous space—created by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a winding structure modeled after the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nasal airways. Once inside, they can stroll around or chill out on skins, tuning in on earphones to community leaders telling narratives and wisdom.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It might sound playful, but the artwork honors a rarely recognized natural marvel: experts have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the surrounding air it breathes in by 80°C, allowing the creature to survive in extreme Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "creates a perception of smallness that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." The artist is a ex- reporter, writer for kids, and environmental activist, who is from a herding family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that fosters the chance to shift your outlook or evoke some modesty," she continues.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The winding installation is part of a features in Sara's engaging commission honoring the heritage, understanding, and philosophy of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Partially migratory, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They've faced discrimination, forced assimilation, and suppression of their language by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the art also highlights the people's challenges associated with the environmental emergency, property rights, and imperialism.

Meaning in Materials

At the extended entrance incline, there's a towering, 26-metre structure of reindeer hides trapped by utility lines. It serves as a analogy for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this component of the installation, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, in which thick coatings of ice develop as varying weather melt and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' main cold-season sustenance, lichen. Goavvi is a result of climate change, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Far North than globally.

A few years back, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi reindeer keepers on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they hauled containers of supplementary feed on to the barren frozen landscape to distribute manually. These animals gathered round us, digging the frozen ground in futility for mossy bits. This resource-intensive and laborious process is having a severe effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. But the alternative is malnutrition. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—a number from starvation, others suffocating after sinking in lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the art is a monument to them. "With the layering of materials, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Perspectives

The installation also emphasizes the clear divergence between the western interpretation of energy as a asset to be harnessed for gain and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of life force as an natural essence in creatures, people, and nature. Tate Modern's legacy as a fossil fuel plant is connected to this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by regional governments. While attempting to be leaders for sustainable power, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the construction of windfarms, hydroelectric dams, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi argue their human rights, livelihoods, and way of life are at risk. "It's hard being such a limited population to stand your ground when the justifications are grounded in saving the world," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the rhetoric of ecology, but yet it's just aiming to find alternative ways to maintain habits of expenditure."

Family Struggles

She and her family have personally disagreed with the state authorities over its ever-stricter regulations on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's brother undertook a set of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the forced culling of his animals, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara created a multi-year series of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi including a huge curtain of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the the event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it resides in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

For many Sámi, creative work appears the sole realm in which they can be understood by outsiders. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|