🔗 Share this article

Guests to Tate Modern are accustomed to surprising encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an man-made sun, glided down amusement rides, and witnessed automated sea creatures hovering through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nose cavities of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this huge space—developed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a maze-like structure based on the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Once inside, they can stroll around or chill out on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to community leaders imparting tales and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

Why choose the nasal structure? It might sound whimsical, but the exhibit honors a rarely recognized natural marvel: scientists have discovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it takes in by 80°C, allowing the animal to thrive in extreme Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "produces a sense of insignificance that you as a human being are not superior over nature." She is a ex- journalist, children's author, and environmental activist, who comes from a herding family in northern Norway. "Possibly that creates the chance to change your perspective or trigger some modesty," she continues.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The winding installation is one of several elements in Sara's immersive art project honoring the culture, understanding, and philosophy of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count about 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They've endured oppression, forced assimilation, and suppression of their language by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi mythology and origin tale, the work also highlights the group's issues relating to the climate crisis, property rights, and external control.

Symbolism in Components

On the lengthy entrance slope, there's a towering, 26-meter sculpture of pelts entangled by utility lines. It represents a analogy for the societal frameworks constraining the Sámi. Part pylon, part heavenly staircase, this component of the artwork, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein thick sheets of ice develop as fluctuating temperatures melt and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' main cold-season food, lichen. The condition is a outcome of global heating, which is occurring up to four times faster in the Polar region than globally.

A few years back, I met with Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they transported carts of food pellets on to the barren tundra to dispense by hand. These animals crowded round us, digging the slippery ground in futility for vegetative bits. This costly and labour-intensive method is having a drastic influence on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. However the other option is malnutrition. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are dying—a number from lack of food, others drowning after falling into water bodies through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the work is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

The installation also highlights the stark difference between the industrial understanding of power as a commodity to be utilized for gain and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of life force as an inherent power in animals, humans, and land. Tate Modern's legacy as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as eco-imperialism by regional governments. In their efforts to be leaders for clean sources, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, river barriers, and extraction sites on their traditional territory; the Sámi contend their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and traditions are at risk. "It's challenging being such a limited population to protect your rights when the justifications are based on global sustainability," Sara notes. "Extractivism has appropriated the language of sustainability, but nonetheless it's just striving to find more suitable ways to maintain habits of consumption."

Family Struggles

The artist and her relatives have personally clashed with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent policies on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's brother embarked on a set of finally failed lawsuits over the required reduction of his livestock, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara produced a multi-year series of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive drape of 400 reindeer skulls, which was shown at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it resides in the entrance.

The Role of Art in Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, visual expression is the sole sphere in which they can be heard by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|