🔗 Share this article

Guests to Tate Modern are accustomed to unusual experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They've basked under an artificial sun, slid down amusement rides, and seen automated sea creatures drifting through the air. Yet this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nose passages of a reindeer. The current artist commission for this huge space—created by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a labyrinthine construction inspired by the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose cavities. Upon entering, they can stroll around or chill out on pelts, listening on headphones to Sámi elders telling tales and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It may appear playful, but the installation honors a little-known natural marvel: experts have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it inhales by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the creature to endure in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "produces a sense of inferiority that you as a person are not dominant over nature." She is a former journalist, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that creates the potential to change your outlook or evoke some modesty," she states.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The maze-like design is among various elements in Sara's absorbing art project celebrating the culture, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They've experienced oppression, forced assimilation, and suppression of their dialect by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the work also highlights the people's issues connected to the global warming, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Meaning in Materials

On the extended access slope, there's a soaring, 26-meter sculpture of skins trapped by electrical wires. It serves as a symbol for the societal frameworks constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this part of the artwork, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, whereby solid coatings of ice form as varying conditions melt and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' key winter sustenance, moss. The condition is a result of climate change, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they carried containers of animal nutrition on to the exposed tundra to distribute by hand. These animals surrounded round us, scratching the icy ground in vain attempts for lichen-covered bits. This expensive and demanding process is having a severe impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. However the alternative is starvation. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—a number from starvation, others submerging after falling into lakes and rivers through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the installation is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

The installation also underscores the sharp divergence between the western understanding of energy as a commodity to be utilized for gain and existence and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an innate essence in creatures, people, and land. The gallery's legacy as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by regional governments. While attempting to be standard bearers for sustainable power, these states have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, river barriers, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi contend their legal protections, ways of life, and traditions are endangered. "It's hard being such a limited population to stand your ground when the reasons are based on global sustainability," Sara observes. "Mining practices has co-opted the discourse of sustainability, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find better ways to continue practices of expenditure."

Individual Challenges

She and her kin have personally clashed with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent policies on animal husbandry. Previously, Sara's sibling initiated a series of unsuccessful legal cases over the required reduction of his animals, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara produced a multi-year set of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge screen of 400 reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the the event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the public gallery, where it hangs in the lobby.

Art as Advocacy

Among the community, visual expression is the only domain in which they can be listened to by outsiders. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|