🔗 Share this article

Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to unexpected experiences in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an simulated sun, slid down spiral slides, and witnessed robotic jellyfish floating through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nasal passages of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this cavernous space—developed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes patrons into a labyrinthine design based on the expanded interior of a reindeer's nasal airways. Upon entering, they can meander around or unwind on pelts, listening on headphones to tribal seniors telling tales and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It could seem whimsical, but the installation pays tribute to a little-known natural marvel: experts have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the surrounding air it takes in by 80°C, helping the creature to survive in extreme Arctic climates. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "produces a sense of inferiority that you as a human being are not superior over nature." Sara is a former reporter, children's author, and rights advocate, who is from a pastoral family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that creates the possibility to shift your outlook or trigger some humbleness," she adds.

A Tribute to Indigenous Heritage

The maze-like design is among various elements in Sara's engaging art project celebrating the heritage, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They've experienced persecution, forced assimilation, and eradication of their language by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the work also highlights the community's struggles connected to the global warming, property rights, and imperialism.

Meaning in Components

At the extended access incline, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot formation of reindeer hides ensnared by utility lines. It can be read as a analogy for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this component of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, whereby solid layers of ice form as fluctuating weather thaw and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' main cold-season food, lichen. Goavvi is a result of global heating, which is occurring up to four times faster in the Far North than in other regions.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they hauled trailers of food pellets on to the exposed Arctic plains to provide by hand. These animals crowded round us, pawing the slippery ground in futility for mossy morsels. This expensive and labour-intensive procedure is having a drastic impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. However the alternative is starvation. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are perishing—some from starvation, others submerging after sinking in water bodies through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the installation is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of elements, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Perspectives

The installation also emphasizes the clear divergence between the industrial view of energy as a commodity to be exploited for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi outlook of energy as an inherent essence in animals, individuals, and land. The gallery's past as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by regional governments. While attempting to be exemplars for renewable energy, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their human rights, ways of life, and culture are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the arguments are rooted in environmental protection," Sara observes. "Extractivism has co-opted the discourse of sustainability, but still it's just aiming to find better ways to persist in habits of use."

Individual Challenges

Sara and her relatives have themselves disagreed with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent rules on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's sibling undertook a series of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the forced culling of his herd, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara created a extended series of creations called Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge curtain of 400 cranial remains, which was shown at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it hangs in the lobby.

The Role of Art in Advocacy

For many Sámi, creative work is the only domain in which they can be understood by outsiders. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|