🔗 Share this article

Guests to Tate Modern are familiar to unexpected encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an artificial sun, slid down spiral slides, and witnessed AI-powered sea creatures hovering through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nose passages of a reindeer. The latest artistic project for this cavernous space—designed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a maze-like structure inspired by the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nasal airways. Inside, they can wander around or relax on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to community leaders imparting tales and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It could sound quirky, but the artwork pays tribute to a obscure scientific wonder: researchers have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it inhales by eighty degrees, helping the animal to survive in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "produces a feeling of inferiority that you as a person are not superior over nature." Sara is a ex- journalist, young adult author, and rights advocate, who hails from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that fosters the possibility to alter your outlook or evoke some humility," she states.

A Celebration to Indigenous Heritage

The maze-like design is among various components in Sara's immersive art project showcasing the culture, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total about 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They have endured discrimination, integration policies, and suppression of their language by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the installation also spotlights the group's issues relating to the climate crisis, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Materials

At the lengthy access slope, there's a towering, eighty-five-foot structure of skins entangled by electrical wires. It represents a metaphor for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this component of the artwork, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi name for an harsh environmental condition, whereby solid layers of ice form as changing temperatures melt and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' main cold-season nourishment, moss. Goavvi is a outcome of climate change, which is happening up to four times faster in the Polar region than globally.

A few years back, I visited Sara in a remote town during a icy season and accompanied Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they hauled carts of supplementary feed on to the barren frozen landscape to dispense through labor. The herd crowded round us, digging the frozen ground in vain attempts for vegetative bits. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive procedure is having a severe impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. However the other option is death. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are dying—a number from hunger, others suffocating after falling into streams through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the installation is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

This artwork also emphasizes the sharp contrast between the western understanding of energy as a commodity to be harnessed for gain and survival and the Sámi outlook of life force as an innate power in creatures, humans, and the environment. This venue's legacy as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be exemplars for sustainable power, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, water power facilities, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi argue their human rights, livelihoods, and culture are at risk. "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 environmentalism, but still it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to maintain practices of use."

Individual Conflicts

Sara and her family have themselves disagreed with the state authorities over its tightening policies on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's brother undertook a set of unsuccessful court actions over the forced culling of his animals, supposedly to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara produced a multi-year series of creations named Pile O'Sápmi including a massive drape of four hundred cranial remains, which was shown at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the public gallery, where it resides in the lobby.

The Role of Art in Advocacy

For numerous Indigenous people, 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|