🔗 Share this article

Guests to Tate Modern are used to unusual encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an man-made sun, glided down amusement rides, and witnessed AI-powered jellyfish drifting through the air. But this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nasal chambers of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this immense space—developed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a winding design inspired by the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Once inside, they can meander around or relax on skins, tuning in on headphones to community leaders sharing narratives and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It might appear whimsical, but the installation celebrates a obscure natural marvel: scientists have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it inhales by 80°C, helping the animal to endure in harsh Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "generates a perception of smallness that you as a human being are not superior over nature." The artist is a former reporter, children's author, and environmental activist, who hails from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that fosters the potential to change your viewpoint or evoke some humbleness," she adds.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The maze-like installation is part of a elements in Sara's absorbing exhibition honoring the culture, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number about 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They've endured discrimination, forced assimilation, and eradication of their tongue by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi mythology and origin tale, the work also draws attention to the community's challenges connected to the global warming, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Meaning in Components

On the extended access ramp, there's a soaring, 26-metre formation of skins trapped by power and light cables. It can be read as a analogy for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this section of the artwork, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, in which solid layers of ice develop as varying conditions thaw and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary cold-season nourishment, moss. The condition is a result of climate change, which is happening up to four times faster in the Polar region than globally.

Previously, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they carried containers of supplementary feed on to the barren Arctic plains to distribute by hand. The herd gathered round us, digging the slippery ground in futility for lichen-covered bits. This expensive and labour-intensive method is having a significant impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. However the alternative is starvation. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are succumbing—some from lack of food, others drowning after plunging into lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the installation is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm introducing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

The sculpture also emphasizes the sharp divergence between the modern interpretation of energy as a resource to be exploited for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an innate essence in creatures, individuals, and land. This venue's legacy as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by regional governments. In their efforts to be exemplars for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have clashed with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, livelihoods, and way of life are at risk. "It's hard being such a limited population to defend yourself when the justifications are rooted in environmental protection," Sara notes. "Extractivism has adopted the discourse of sustainability, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find better ways to persist in habits of use."

Individual Conflicts

She and her relatives have themselves conflicted with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent policies on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's sibling embarked on a sequence of finally failed legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, apparently to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a four-year series of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi including a huge curtain of 400 cranial remains, which was exhibited at the the show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the public gallery, where it resides in the entryway.

Art as Activism

For many Sámi, visual expression seems the sole domain in which they can be understood by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|