🔗 Share this article

Visitors to the renowned gallery are used to unexpected experiences in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an artificial sun, glided down amusement rides, and observed AI-powered jellyfish drifting through the air. However this marks the first time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nasal chambers of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this immense space—designed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a winding construction inspired by the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Upon entering, they can meander around or relax on reindeer hides, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors imparting tales and knowledge.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why the nose? It might appear quirky, but the exhibit honors a little-known scientific wonder: experts have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, helping the creature to survive in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara explains, "creates a perception of smallness that you as a individual are not superior over nature." She is a former writer, children's author, and environmental activist, who hails from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that fosters the chance to change your perspective or spark some modesty," she states.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The maze-like installation is one of several components in Sara's absorbing commission honoring the traditions, understanding, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count about 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They've experienced persecution, cultural suppression, and eradication of their language by all four states. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the art also spotlights the group's struggles relating to the climate crisis, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Materials

Along the extended entry slope, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot sculpture of skins trapped by utility lines. It represents a metaphor for the societal frameworks restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this part of the installation, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein solid coatings of ice develop as changing weather liquefy and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' main cold-season sustenance, moss. This phenomenon is a outcome of global heating, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Polar region than elsewhere.

A few years back, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they hauled containers of animal nutrition on to the exposed frozen landscape to dispense manually. The reindeer crowded round us, digging the icy ground in vain attempts for mossy morsels. This costly and laborious procedure is having a severe effect on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the alternative is starvation. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are succumbing—some from lack of food, others suffocating after sinking in streams through prematurely melting ice. To some extent, the installation is a tribute to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

The installation also emphasizes the clear divergence between the western understanding of power as a asset to be utilized for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an innate life force in creatures, humans, and land. Tate Modern's history as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by regional governments. As they strive to be exemplars for renewable energy, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, river barriers, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi argue their legal protections, livelihoods, and way of life are endangered. "It's challenging being such a small minority to defend yourself when the justifications are grounded in global sustainability," Sara comments. "Resource exploitation has adopted the discourse of ecology, but nonetheless it's just striving to find more suitable ways to maintain practices of use."

Family Struggles

She and her relatives have personally disagreed with the state authorities over its increasingly stringent regulations on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's brother undertook a series of finally failed court actions over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara produced a four-year series of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge drape of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was shown at the 2017's art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it resides in the lobby.

The Role of Art in Activism

Among the community, visual expression seems the sole domain in which they can be heard by people of other nations. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|