🔗 Share this article

Visitors to the renowned gallery are accustomed to unexpected encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've basked under an artificial sun, glided down spiral slides, and seen automated jellyfish drifting through the air. However this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nasal chambers of a reindeer. The latest artistic project for this immense space—designed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a labyrinthine structure inspired by the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nasal airways. Once inside, they can meander around or chill out on reindeer hides, tuning in on earphones to tribal seniors sharing stories and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It may sound playful, but the artwork celebrates a obscure natural marvel: researchers have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it inhales by 80°C, allowing the creature to survive in harsh Arctic conditions. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "creates a sense of insignificance that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." Sara is a ex- journalist, writer for kids, and land defender, who is from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that creates the potential to alter your outlook or trigger some modesty," she states.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The labyrinthine design is one of several components in Sara's absorbing exhibition celebrating the heritage, understanding, and philosophy of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They have endured discrimination, integration policies, and eradication of their language by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the art also spotlights the community's issues relating to the environmental emergency, property rights, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Elements

Along the lengthy access incline, there's a towering, 26-meter structure of pelts entangled by utility lines. It represents a analogy for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this part of the artwork, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which solid sheets of ice appear as changing temperatures thaw and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary cold-season sustenance, moss. This phenomenon is a outcome of planetary warming, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Far North than globally.

A few years back, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and went with Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they transported carts of supplementary feed on to the exposed frozen landscape to distribute by hand. The reindeer crowded round us, digging the frozen ground in vain attempts for vegetative bits. This expensive and demanding method is having a drastic impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. Yet the other option is malnutrition. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are dying—a number from lack of food, others submerging after falling into water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the work is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm introducing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

The sculpture also emphasizes the sharp difference between the industrial view of power as a commodity to be utilized for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of life force as an innate power in animals, individuals, and the environment. Tate Modern's history as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by regional governments. While attempting to be leaders for renewable energy, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, water power facilities, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their human rights, incomes, and traditions are endangered. "It's challenging being such a small minority to protect your rights when the arguments are rooted in saving the world," Sara comments. "Extractivism has appropriated the language of sustainability, but still it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to continue patterns of consumption."

Personal Conflicts

The artist and her relatives have themselves disagreed with the state authorities over its tightening regulations on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's sibling undertook a sequence of finally failed court actions over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara developed a four-year collection of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive screen of 400 reindeer skulls, which was shown at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it is displayed in the entrance.

Art as Advocacy

For many Sámi, visual expression appears the sole realm in which they can be listened to by outsiders. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|