🔗 Share this article

Guests to Tate Modern are familiar to unexpected encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an artificial sun, glided down spiral slides, and witnessed automated sea creatures floating through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nasal chambers of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this immense space—created by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a maze-like construction based on the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Upon entering, they can stroll around or chill out on reindeer hides, tuning in on earphones to Sámi elders imparting tales and insights.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It may appear whimsical, but the installation honors a rarely recognized scientific wonder: scientists have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, helping the animal to survive in harsh Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "generates a perception of inferiority that you as a person are not superior over nature." Sara is a ex- journalist, young adult author, and rights advocate, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Maybe that generates the chance to change your outlook or evoke some modesty," she continues.

A Celebration to Indigenous Heritage

The maze-like design is part of a features in Sara's engaging art project celebrating the heritage, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count about 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They've experienced persecution, cultural suppression, and suppression of their language by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the art also draws attention to the group's issues relating to the climate crisis, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Meaning in Materials

At the long entry ramp, there's a looming, 26-meter structure of pelts entangled by electrical wires. It can be read as a analogy for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this part of the exhibit, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, whereby dense coatings of ice appear as changing weather melt and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' main cold-season food, fungus. This phenomenon is a outcome of climate change, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than elsewhere.

A few years back, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a icy season and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in freezing temperatures as they hauled trailers of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to distribute manually. The herd gathered round us, pawing the icy ground in vain attempts for lichen-covered morsels. This expensive and labour-intensive process is having a significant impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. Yet the choice is death. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are succumbing—some from hunger, others submerging after plunging into lakes and rivers through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the work is a memorial to them. "With the layering of materials, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Perspectives

This artwork also underscores the sharp contrast between the industrial view of energy as a resource to be exploited for gain and survival and the Sámi philosophy of life force as an inherent essence in animals, people, and land. The gallery's history as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be exemplars for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of wind energy projects, water power facilities, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi contend their fundamental freedoms, livelihoods, and traditions are at risk. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to protect your rights when the justifications are grounded in global sustainability," Sara notes. "Mining practices has co-opted the discourse of ecology, but yet it's just attempting to find alternative ways to continue patterns of use."

Family Challenges

She and her family have themselves clashed with the state authorities over its tightening policies on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's sibling initiated a set of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara produced a four-year set of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive curtain of 400 cranial remains, which was displayed at the 2017's art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it is displayed in the lobby.

The Role of Art in Activism

For many Sámi, art is the exclusive sphere in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|