🔗 Share this article

Visitors to Tate Modern are used to unexpected experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They have basked under an artificial sun, descended down amusement rides, and witnessed AI-powered jellyfish hovering through the air. But this marks the first time they will be immersing themselves in the complex nasal cavities of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this huge space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a winding design inspired by the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nose passages. Once inside, they can meander around or chill out on skins, listening on headphones to community leaders telling tales and knowledge.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It might appear whimsical, but the exhibit honors a rarely recognized biological feat: experts have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it inhales by eighty degrees, enabling the creature to survive in harsh Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara explains, "creates a perception of insignificance that you as a individual are not superior over nature." Sara is a ex- journalist, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who is from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that generates the chance to shift your viewpoint or trigger some humbleness," she adds.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The maze-like design is among various features in Sara's engaging art project showcasing the traditions, understanding, and philosophy of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They have faced persecution, forced assimilation, and eradication of their tongue by all four nations. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the installation also highlights the community's challenges associated with the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Meaning in Elements

Along the lengthy entrance slope, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot sculpture of pelts ensnared by electrical wires. It represents a symbol for the societal frameworks restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this section of the installation, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, wherein dense sheets of ice develop as fluctuating temperatures melt and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary winter food, moss. This phenomenon is a result of planetary warming, which is happening up to four times faster in the Polar region than in other regions.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and went with Sámi reindeer keepers on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they transported trailers of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured tundra to provide by hand. These animals crowded round us, scratching the slippery ground in vain for mossy morsels. This resource-intensive and laborious method is having a drastic impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. But the choice is death. As these icy periods become frequent, reindeer are dying—some from lack of food, others suffocating after falling into lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the installation is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

The installation also underscores the clear contrast between the western understanding of power as a commodity to be harnessed for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi philosophy of life force as an natural life force in animals, individuals, and the environment. The gallery's history as a fossil fuel plant is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by regional governments. While attempting to be exemplars for clean sources, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and mines on their traditional territory; the Sámi contend their human rights, ways of life, and culture are at risk. "It's hard being such a tiny group to stand your ground when the justifications are rooted in saving the world," Sara comments. "Mining practices has adopted the rhetoric of ecology, but still it's just aiming to find alternative ways to continue patterns of use."

Individual Conflicts

Sara and her relatives have themselves clashed with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter regulations on herding. Previously, Sara's sibling undertook a sequence of unsuccessful court actions over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara developed a extended series of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive curtain of numerous cranial remains, which was shown at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the lobby.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work seems the sole domain in which they can be understood by outsiders. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|