🔗 Share this article

Attendees to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an man-made sun, slid down helter skelters, and observed AI-powered jellyfish hovering through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nose chambers of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this cavernous space—developed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a winding design inspired by the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nasal airways. Once inside, they can wander around or relax on pelts, tuning in on headphones to community leaders sharing tales and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It may seem whimsical, but the exhibit honors a little-known biological feat: experts have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it inhales by 80°C, enabling the creature to survive in harsh Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "creates a perception of insignificance that you as a individual are not in control over nature." Sara is a former writer, children's author, and rights advocate, who comes from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that creates the possibility to alter your perspective or trigger some humility," she continues.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The maze-like installation is part of a features in Sara's engaging art project showcasing the heritage, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They've endured oppression, cultural suppression, and suppression of their language by all four nations. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the work also highlights the group's struggles associated with the global warming, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Components

At the long entrance incline, there's a towering, 26-meter formation of skins trapped by utility lines. It serves as a metaphor for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this part of the exhibit, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which solid coatings of ice appear as varying conditions melt and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' main winter food, lichen. The condition is a outcome of global heating, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they transported trailers of food pellets on to the wind-scoured tundra to provide through labor. These animals crowded round us, digging the slippery ground in futility for lichen-covered morsels. This expensive and demanding process is having a significant impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. Yet the other option is starvation. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are dying—a number from hunger, others submerging after sinking in streams through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the art is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Perspectives

The sculpture also underscores the stark divergence between the western understanding of power as a asset to be utilized for profit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of energy as an innate essence in creatures, people, and the environment. The gallery's history as a fossil fuel plant is linked with this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by Nordic countries. In their efforts to be exemplars for clean sources, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of wind energy projects, river barriers, and mines on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their legal protections, ways of life, and culture are threatened. "It's challenging being such a small minority to defend yourself when the reasons are based on global sustainability," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the rhetoric of sustainability, but still it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to maintain habits of use."

Family Challenges

The artist and her relatives have themselves disagreed with the state authorities over its ever-stricter regulations on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's sibling undertook a series of unsuccessful court actions over the forced culling of his livestock, apparently to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara produced a four-year series of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi featuring a colossal screen of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it is displayed in the entryway.

Art as Activism

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