🔗 Share this article

Guests to the renowned gallery are familiar to unexpected displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an simulated sun, descended down helter skelters, and observed automated jellyfish drifting through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nasal chambers of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this cavernous space—designed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a labyrinthine structure based on the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nasal airways. Inside, they can wander around or relax on skins, tuning in on earphones to community leaders imparting narratives and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

Why choose the nasal structure? It might sound quirky, but the artwork pays tribute to a little-known natural marvel: researchers have found that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it inhales by eighty degrees, enabling the creature to thrive in harsh Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara notes, "creates a sense of inferiority that you as a person are not in control over nature." The artist is a ex- journalist, children's author, and environmental activist, who comes from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that fosters the potential to shift your viewpoint or trigger some modesty," she continues.

A Tribute to Indigenous Heritage

The maze-like installation is part of a components in Sara's absorbing art project showcasing the heritage, knowledge, and philosophy of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Partially migratory, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They have endured discrimination, cultural suppression, and eradication of their dialect by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the work also spotlights the community's challenges connected to the global warming, loss of territory, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Elements

On the long entry slope, there's a looming, 26-metre formation of reindeer hides trapped by power and light cables. It serves as a metaphor for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this component of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi word for an severe climatic event, in which dense layers of ice form as changing temperatures liquefy and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' main cold-season food, lichen. This phenomenon is a outcome of planetary warming, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Polar region than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a icy season and went with Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they carried trailers of supplementary feed on to the barren frozen landscape to distribute through labor. The reindeer gathered round us, digging the slippery ground in futility for mossy bits. This costly and labour-intensive procedure is having a drastic influence on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. However the alternative is starvation. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—some from lack of food, others suffocating after sinking in streams through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the art is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

The sculpture also emphasizes the sharp divergence between the western understanding of energy as a resource to be utilized for profit and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of life force as an inherent life force in creatures, people, and nature. Tate Modern's legacy as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by regional governments. While attempting to be exemplars for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of windfarms, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi argue their legal protections, ways of life, and culture are at risk. "It's challenging being such a small minority to defend yourself when the arguments are based on environmental protection," Sara observes. "Mining practices has adopted the discourse of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to persist in practices of expenditure."

Family Challenges

Sara and her kin have personally conflicted with the Norwegian government over its tightening policies on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's brother embarked on a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara produced a multi-year set of creations named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive drape of numerous animal bones, which was displayed at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the national institution, where it is displayed in the entryway.

The Role of Art in Advocacy

For many Sámi, art seems the sole sphere in which they can be heard by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|