🔗 Share this article

Visitors to Tate Modern are accustomed to surprising experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an simulated sun, slid down spiral slides, and observed robotic jellyfish drifting through the air. But this marks the first time they will be immersing themselves in the detailed nasal passages of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a maze-like design inspired by the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Inside, they can stroll around or relax on reindeer hides, tuning in on earphones to tribal seniors sharing tales and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It might seem whimsical, but the artwork celebrates a little-known scientific wonder: researchers have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it inhales by 80°C, enabling the creature to survive in inhospitable Arctic climates. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "generates a perception of smallness that you as a individual are not superior over nature." The artist is a ex- writer, young adult author, and land defender, who hails from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that generates the possibility to shift your outlook or trigger some humbleness," she states.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The winding installation is part of a components in Sara's immersive art project honoring the culture, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They have faced persecution, integration policies, and suppression of their language by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the art also spotlights the people's issues associated with the climate crisis, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Materials

Along the long access incline, there's a soaring, 26-metre formation of reindeer hides ensnared by utility lines. It represents a metaphor for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this component of the artwork, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, in which dense layers of ice form as varying temperatures liquefy and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' primary cold-season sustenance, lichen. Goavvi is a result of global heating, which is taking place up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than in other regions.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and joined Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they carried trailers of food pellets on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to distribute manually. The herd surrounded round us, digging the frozen ground in vain for vegetative morsels. This resource-intensive and laborious process is having a drastic effect on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. However the alternative is malnutrition. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are dying—some from starvation, others submerging after sinking in water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the installation is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

The sculpture also emphasizes the clear difference between the western view of power as a resource to be harnessed for gain and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of life force as an innate life force in creatures, humans, and the environment. This venue's history as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be standard bearers for renewable energy, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, river barriers, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their legal protections, livelihoods, and way of life are at risk. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to protect your rights when the justifications are grounded in global sustainability," Sara comments. "Mining practices has co-opted the language of sustainability, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to maintain practices of use."

Personal Struggles

She and her kin have personally conflicted with the national administration over its ever-stricter rules on animal husbandry. Previously, Sara's sibling undertook a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the required reduction of his animals, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a four-year set of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi including a huge drape of 400 animal bones, which was shown at the the event Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the lobby.

The Role of Art in Advocacy

For many Sámi, art seems the only domain in which they can be listened to by outsiders. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|