🔗 Share this article

Guests to the renowned gallery are used to unusual displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an artificial sun, glided down amusement rides, and witnessed robotic sea creatures floating through the air. However this marks the first time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The current artist commission for this cavernous space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a winding construction inspired by the expanded inside of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Inside, they can wander around or unwind on pelts, listening on earphones to tribal seniors imparting tales and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It might appear quirky, but the artwork honors a little-known scientific wonder: experts have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it breathes in by 80°C, enabling the creature to endure in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "creates a sense of inferiority that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." She is a ex- journalist, children's author, and rights advocate, who hails from a herding family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that generates the potential to shift your outlook or evoke some humility," she adds.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The maze-like installation is part of a elements in Sara's absorbing art project celebrating the traditions, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi count about 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They've endured oppression, integration policies, and repression of their tongue by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the work also spotlights the community's struggles connected to the climate crisis, loss of territory, and colonialism.

Meaning in Elements

At the lengthy access incline, there's a soaring, 26-meter sculpture of skins trapped by power and light cables. It serves as a analogy for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this component of the installation, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, in which dense coatings of ice form as fluctuating weather thaw and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' main winter sustenance, lichen. Goavvi is a consequence of global heating, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they carried carts of food pellets on to the exposed tundra to distribute by hand. These animals gathered round us, pawing the frozen ground in vain for mossy morsels. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive process is having a drastic influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. However the choice is malnutrition. As these icy periods become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—some from starvation, others drowning after falling into lakes and rivers through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the art is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of elements, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

This artwork also underscores the stark contrast between the western understanding of electricity as a asset to be utilized for profit and survival and the Sámi worldview of life force as an innate power in creatures, people, and land. Tate Modern's legacy as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider eco-imperialism by regional governments. In their efforts to be exemplars for clean sources, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the construction of windfarms, river barriers, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their human rights, incomes, and culture are endangered. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the justifications are grounded in global sustainability," Sara observes. "Mining practices has appropriated the rhetoric of environmentalism, but still it's just attempting to find better ways to maintain practices of consumption."

Individual Struggles

Sara and her family have themselves clashed with the national administration over its ever-stricter policies on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's sibling embarked on a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the required reduction of his herd, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara created a multi-year collection of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal screen of 400 reindeer skulls, which was shown at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it resides in the entryway.

The Role of Art in Awareness

For many Sámi, art seems the sole sphere in which they can be heard by people of other nations. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|