🔗 Share this article

Attendees to Tate Modern are familiar to unexpected encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an simulated sun, slid down amusement rides, and observed automated jellyfish floating through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nose chambers of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this huge space—designed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a maze-like design modeled after the expanded inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Upon entering, they can meander around or relax on skins, listening on earphones to community leaders telling narratives and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

Why choose the nasal structure? It might appear playful, but the exhibit honors a obscure scientific wonder: scientists have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, helping the creature to thrive in harsh Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "produces a feeling of inferiority that you as a human being are not in control over nature." Sara is a ex- writer, children's author, and rights advocate, who is from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that generates the possibility to alter your viewpoint or spark some humility," she states.

An Homage to Indigenous Heritage

The maze-like design is one of several components in Sara's immersive exhibition honoring the traditions, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They have endured persecution, integration policies, and repression of their tongue by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi mythology and origin tale, the work also highlights the community's challenges connected to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Materials

Along the extended entry slope, there's a looming, 26-metre structure of reindeer hides ensnared by electrical wires. It can be read as a symbol for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this component of the artwork, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, wherein solid sheets of ice form as varying conditions thaw and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' key winter nourishment, lichen. The condition is a outcome of climate change, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Far North than globally.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they carried trailers of food pellets on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to distribute manually. These animals surrounded round us, pawing the icy ground in vain for lichen-covered pieces. This resource-intensive and laborious method is having a drastic influence on herding practices—and on the animals' natural survival. But the alternative is malnutrition. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—a number from hunger, others submerging after sinking in lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the installation is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

The sculpture also highlights the sharp difference between the western understanding of power as a asset to be harnessed for gain and survival and the Sámi worldview of life force as an innate power in animals, people, and nature. This venue's legacy as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by Nordic countries. In their efforts to be exemplars for sustainable power, Nordic nations have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of windfarms, water power facilities, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi contend their human rights, incomes, and way of life are endangered. "It's hard being such a tiny group to protect your rights when the reasons are based on environmental protection," Sara notes. "Mining practices has co-opted the rhetoric of sustainability, but nonetheless it's just attempting to find alternative ways to maintain practices of expenditure."

Family Struggles

She and her kin have personally clashed with the national administration over its ever-stricter rules on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's sibling initiated a series of finally failed legal cases over the required reduction of his herd, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara created a extended set of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal screen of 400 animal bones, which was shown at the the event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

For numerous Indigenous people, art appears the sole realm in which they can be heard by the global community. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|