🔗 Share this article

Visitors to Tate Modern are accustomed to surprising encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an artificial sun, descended down amusement rides, and seen robotic sea creatures floating through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the complex nasal passages of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this immense space—created by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages patrons into a winding structure modeled after the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Once inside, they can wander around or unwind on reindeer hides, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors imparting stories and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It might sound quirky, but the exhibit pays tribute to a rarely recognized biological feat: experts have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it breathes in by 80°C, helping the animal to survive in harsh Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara notes, "creates a sense of insignificance that you as a person are not in control over nature." The artist is a former writer, children's author, and rights advocate, who comes from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that creates the chance to alter your perspective or evoke some humility," she states.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The winding structure is part of a features in Sara's engaging art project celebrating the heritage, knowledge, and philosophy of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi number roughly 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They've experienced persecution, cultural suppression, and eradication of their tongue by all four nations. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi mythology and origin tale, the work also highlights the people's struggles relating to the global warming, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Materials

At the long access ramp, there's a soaring, 26-meter sculpture of skins trapped by power and light cables. It can be read as a analogy for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this part of the exhibit, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein thick sheets of ice appear as varying weather liquefy and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' main cold-season sustenance, fungus. The condition is a result of planetary warming, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Far North than globally.

Previously, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi herders on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they hauled carts of food pellets on to the exposed tundra to provide by hand. These animals gathered round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain for vegetative bits. This expensive and demanding process is having a drastic influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. However the choice is starvation. As these icy periods become frequent, reindeer are perishing—some from hunger, others drowning after falling into streams through unstable frozen surfaces. In a sense, the work is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

This artwork also highlights the sharp divergence between the western understanding of electricity as a asset to be exploited for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi worldview of energy as an innate power in creatures, individuals, and land. This venue's past as a fossil fuel plant is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by Nordic countries. While attempting to be standard bearers for renewable energy, Nordic nations have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of windfarms, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi argue their legal protections, ways of life, and way of life are threatened. "It's hard being such a tiny group to stand your ground when the arguments are rooted in global sustainability," Sara observes. "Mining practices has co-opted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but yet it's just striving to find alternative ways to persist in practices of consumption."

Personal Challenges

She and her family have themselves conflicted with the national administration over its ever-stricter rules on herding. In 2016, Sara's sibling undertook a series of finally failed court actions over the forced culling of his animals, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara created a extended set of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive curtain of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the entryway.

Art as Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work is the sole sphere in which they can be heard by outsiders. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|