🔗 Share this article

Visitors to Tate Modern are accustomed to unusual experiences in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an artificial sun, glided down spiral slides, and witnessed AI-powered sea creatures drifting through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nasal passages of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this cavernous space—developed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a labyrinthine construction based on the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Inside, they can wander around or chill out on pelts, tuning in on earphones to tribal seniors telling narratives and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It may seem whimsical, but the artwork pays tribute to a little-known biological feat: experts have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the animal to endure in inhospitable Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara notes, "produces a sense of insignificance that you as a human being are not superior over nature." Sara is a ex- writer, children's author, and rights advocate, who is from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that creates the possibility to change your viewpoint or spark some humility," she states.

A Celebration to Indigenous Heritage

The labyrinthine installation is among various components in Sara's engaging commission honoring the heritage, science, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total about 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They have experienced oppression, cultural suppression, and suppression of their tongue by all four nations. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the installation also highlights the community's issues relating to the global warming, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Materials

On the lengthy entry slope, there's a towering, eighty-five-foot formation of reindeer hides entangled by power and light cables. It serves as a analogy for the societal frameworks restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this section of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which solid layers of ice appear as fluctuating temperatures thaw and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' primary cold-season nourishment, lichen. The condition is a outcome of planetary warming, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Far North than globally.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and joined Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in freezing temperatures as they carried trailers of supplementary feed on to the barren Arctic plains to dispense by hand. These animals crowded round us, pawing the frozen ground in vain for lichen-covered pieces. This expensive and laborious process is having a severe impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. However the choice is starvation. As goavvi winters become frequent, reindeer are dying—some from starvation, others suffocating after plunging into streams through unstable frozen surfaces. In a sense, the work is a monument to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

This artwork also emphasizes the sharp contrast between the industrial interpretation of energy as a commodity to be harnessed for gain and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of life force as an innate life force in creatures, people, and the environment. Tate Modern's past as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as eco-imperialism by regional governments. In their efforts to be leaders for sustainable power, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their legal protections, incomes, and way of life are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the reasons are rooted in global sustainability," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the discourse of sustainability, but still it's just aiming to find alternative ways to persist in habits of expenditure."

Personal Challenges

Sara and her relatives have personally conflicted with the state authorities over its ever-stricter rules on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's brother undertook a series of finally failed court actions over the forced culling of his animals, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara produced a extended collection of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive drape of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the 2017's art exhibition Documenta 14 and later purchased by the national institution, where it resides in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Awareness

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