🔗 Share this article

Guests to Tate Modern are used to surprising experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an simulated sun, slid down spiral slides, and witnessed automated jellyfish floating through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nose passages of a reindeer. The current artist commission for this cavernous space—designed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a labyrinthine construction based on the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Inside, they can stroll around or chill out on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to community leaders sharing stories and knowledge.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It could sound quirky, but the artwork celebrates a little-known scientific wonder: scientists have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it breathes in by eighty degrees, helping the animal to endure in harsh Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "produces a sense of inferiority that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." Sara is a former journalist, young adult author, and environmental activist, who hails from a pastoral family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that generates the potential to change your outlook or evoke some humbleness," she continues.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The labyrinthine installation is one of several features in Sara's absorbing commission honoring the culture, science, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Partially migratory, the Sámi number about 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (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 origin tale, the installation also highlights the people's issues connected to the environmental emergency, property rights, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Components

On the lengthy entry incline, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot formation of reindeer hides trapped by electrical wires. It can be read as a metaphor for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this component of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, in which thick sheets of ice appear as changing conditions thaw and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary winter sustenance, lichen. Goavvi is a outcome of global heating, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than globally.

Previously, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a icy season and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they hauled containers of animal nutrition on to the barren tundra to dispense manually. These animals surrounded round us, digging the slippery ground in vain for lichen-covered pieces. This resource-intensive and demanding procedure is having a drastic influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. But the other option is malnutrition. As goavvi winters become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—some from starvation, others drowning after falling into water bodies through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the work is a memorial to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Perspectives

This artwork also emphasizes the sharp contrast between the western interpretation of energy as a asset to be utilized for profit and survival and the Sámi outlook of energy as an innate life force in animals, individuals, and nature. The gallery's past as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi consider environmental exploitation by Nordic countries. As they strive to be exemplars for renewable energy, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, river barriers, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their human rights, ways of life, and culture are endangered. "It's challenging being such a limited population to protect your rights when the reasons are rooted in environmental protection," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the discourse of ecology, but yet it's just attempting to find alternative ways to persist in practices of consumption."

Individual Challenges

Sara and her kin have personally clashed with the Norwegian government over its tightening policies on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's brother embarked on a series of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, apparently to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a multi-year series of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi including a huge screen of numerous reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the the show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it resides in the entryway.

The Role of Art in Activism

For many Sámi, creative work appears the exclusive realm in which they can be understood by people of other nations. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|