🔗 Share this article

Visitors to the renowned gallery are accustomed to surprising experiences in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have basked under an man-made sun, descended down spiral slides, and observed AI-powered jellyfish floating through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be venturing themselves in the complex nose passages of a reindeer. The latest artistic project for this huge space—developed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a maze-like design based on the expanded inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Inside, they can stroll around or unwind on skins, tuning in on earphones to community leaders sharing narratives and knowledge.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why choose the nasal structure? It might appear whimsical, but the installation celebrates a rarely recognized natural marvel: experts have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the surrounding air it breathes in by eighty degrees, helping the creature to survive in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara notes, "creates a feeling of insignificance that you as a human being are not superior over nature." She is a former journalist, children's author, and rights advocate, who comes from a pastoral family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that fosters the chance to change your viewpoint or evoke some modesty," she adds.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The maze-like structure is among various features in Sara's absorbing exhibition celebrating the heritage, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count about 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They have faced discrimination, cultural suppression, and repression of their dialect by all four nations. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the art also spotlights the people's issues relating to the climate crisis, property rights, and external control.

Symbolism in Components

Along the long entry incline, there's a soaring, 26-metre structure of pelts ensnared by utility lines. It represents a metaphor for the societal frameworks constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this section of the exhibit, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, wherein solid layers of ice form as changing weather thaw and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' main winter sustenance, moss. Goavvi is a outcome of global heating, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than elsewhere.

Previously, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and went with Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they hauled carts of food pellets on to the wind-scoured tundra to dispense by hand. The reindeer gathered round us, pawing the slippery ground in futility for vegetative pieces. This costly and demanding method is having a drastic effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the alternative is starvation. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—a number from lack of food, others drowning after sinking in streams through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the installation is a memorial to them. "With the layering of materials, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

The installation also underscores the sharp difference between the industrial understanding of electricity as a commodity to be harnessed for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of energy as an inherent power in animals, individuals, and land. Tate Modern's past as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider environmental exploitation by regional governments. While attempting to be standard bearers for clean sources, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of windfarms, river barriers, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and way of life are endangered. "It's challenging being such a limited population to stand your ground when the reasons are rooted in environmental protection," Sara comments. "Mining practices has appropriated the rhetoric of ecology, but still it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to maintain habits of consumption."

Personal Conflicts

She and her relatives have themselves clashed with the national administration over its ever-stricter regulations on herding. A few years ago, Sara's brother embarked on a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful court actions over the forced culling of his livestock, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara developed a multi-year set of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge curtain of four hundred animal bones, which was exhibited at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the entrance.

Art as Activism

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