🔗 Share this article

Visitors to Tate Modern are accustomed to unexpected displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an simulated sun, descended down helter skelters, and seen AI-powered sea creatures drifting through the air. Yet this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nose chambers of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a winding design modeled after the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Once inside, they can meander around or chill out on skins, listening on headphones to community leaders sharing stories and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It might seem whimsical, but the installation pays tribute to a rarely recognized scientific wonder: researchers have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it breathes in by 80°C, enabling the animal to thrive in harsh Arctic conditions. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara explains, "creates a sense of inferiority that you as a individual are not in control over nature." The artist is a ex- writer, children's author, and environmental activist, who is from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that creates the potential to alter your outlook or evoke some humbleness," she states.

An Homage to Indigenous Heritage

The maze-like structure is among various components in Sara's immersive art project celebrating the culture, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They have faced persecution, cultural suppression, and repression of their language by all four states. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the art also highlights the group's challenges connected to the global warming, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Components

Along the extended access incline, there's a towering, 26-meter structure of skins ensnared by power and light cables. It can be read as a symbol for the societal frameworks constraining the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this part of the artwork, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby solid sheets of ice develop as varying conditions thaw and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' primary cold-season food, fungus. Goavvi is a consequence of climate change, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than in other regions.

Previously, I met with Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they transported containers of food pellets on to the exposed frozen landscape to provide by hand. The reindeer surrounded round us, digging the frozen ground in vain for vegetative morsels. This resource-intensive and demanding method is having a significant influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the alternative is malnutrition. As these icy periods become frequent, reindeer are perishing—a number from starvation, others drowning after falling into water bodies through prematurely melting ice. To some extent, the installation is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

The installation also emphasizes the stark contrast between the modern interpretation of power as a commodity to be harnessed for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an natural power in animals, people, and the environment. Tate Modern's legacy 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 leaders for sustainable power, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the development of windfarms, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their traditional territory; the Sámi contend their legal protections, incomes, and traditions are endangered. "It's hard being such a small minority to stand your ground when the arguments are grounded in saving the world," Sara observes. "Mining practices has co-opted the rhetoric of sustainability, but yet it's just attempting to find better ways to continue practices of consumption."

Individual Struggles

She and her kin have themselves clashed with the state authorities over its tightening policies on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's sibling undertook a series of ultimately unsuccessful court actions over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara produced a extended set of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal curtain of four hundred cranial remains, which was exhibited at the 2017's art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the lobby.

The Role of Art in Advocacy

Among the community, creative work seems the only domain in which they can be heard by outsiders. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|