🔗 Share this article

Guests to Tate Modern are familiar to unexpected encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an artificial sun, descended down amusement rides, and seen robotic jellyfish hovering through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The current artist commission for this huge space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a labyrinthine construction based on the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Inside, they can meander around or relax on pelts, listening on earphones to Sámi elders imparting stories and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It may sound playful, but the artwork celebrates a little-known natural marvel: scientists have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, helping the animal to endure in inhospitable Arctic climates. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "generates a feeling of smallness that you as a individual are not in control over nature." The artist is a ex- reporter, writer for kids, and environmental activist, who is from a pastoral family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that generates the possibility to shift your perspective or evoke some humbleness," she adds.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The winding design is among various features in Sara's engaging exhibition honoring the heritage, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Partially migratory, the Sámi total about 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They've faced discrimination, forced assimilation, and repression of their dialect by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the installation also spotlights the community's struggles connected to the global warming, land dispossession, and external control.

Meaning in Materials

On the long entrance ramp, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot formation of pelts trapped by power and light cables. It serves as a analogy for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Part pylon, part spiritual ascent, this part of the artwork, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an harsh environmental condition, wherein dense coatings of ice appear as fluctuating weather melt and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary winter sustenance, fungus. Goavvi is a result of global heating, which is occurring up to four times faster in the Arctic than elsewhere.

A few years back, I met with Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and went with Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they transported trailers of supplementary feed on to the exposed Arctic plains to distribute through labor. The herd crowded round us, scratching the slippery ground in vain for lichen-covered pieces. This expensive and demanding process is having a severe impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. However the choice is death. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—some from hunger, others submerging after plunging into streams through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the art is a monument to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm introducing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

The sculpture also highlights the stark contrast between the modern view of power as a commodity to be exploited for gain and existence and the Sámi philosophy of life force as an innate essence in creatures, people, and nature. Tate Modern's legacy as a fossil fuel plant is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by Nordic countries. While attempting to be leaders for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have clashed with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, hydroelectric dams, and mines on their traditional territory; the Sámi contend their human rights, ways of life, and way of life are endangered. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to protect your rights when the arguments are rooted in global sustainability," Sara comments. "Mining practices has appropriated the language of ecology, but nonetheless it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to persist in practices of consumption."

Family Struggles

She and her relatives have personally disagreed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent rules on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's brother undertook a set of finally failed legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, apparently to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a extended series of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal curtain of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was shown at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it hangs in the lobby.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work is the sole realm in which they can be understood by the global community. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|