🔗 Share this article

Guests to the renowned gallery are accustomed to unusual displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an artificial sun, slid down spiral slides, and observed robotic sea creatures hovering through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nasal passages of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this huge space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a labyrinthine construction inspired by the expanded inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Inside, they can meander around or unwind on skins, listening on headphones to Sámi elders telling tales and insights.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why the nose? It may appear quirky, but the artwork honors a rarely recognized natural marvel: scientists have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it inhales by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the creature to thrive in extreme Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "generates a perception of smallness that you as a human being are not in control over nature." She is a ex- writer, children's author, and land defender, who comes from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that generates the chance to shift your outlook or evoke some humility," she continues.

A Tribute to Traditional Ways

The labyrinthine design is one of several features in Sara's engaging art project celebrating the traditions, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Partially migratory, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They have endured persecution, forced assimilation, and repression of their dialect by all four nations. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the work also draws attention to the community's challenges connected to the global warming, property rights, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Elements

On the long entrance incline, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot sculpture of skins ensnared by utility lines. It serves as a metaphor for the societal frameworks constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this part of the artwork, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which thick sheets of ice appear as changing weather melt and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' main winter food, fungus. Goavvi is a result of climate change, which is taking place up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and went with Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they carried containers of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to dispense manually. These animals surrounded round us, pawing the frozen ground in vain attempts for lichen-covered pieces. This costly and laborious procedure is having a severe effect on herding practices—and on the animals' natural survival. But the other option is starvation. As goavvi winters become frequent, reindeer are perishing—a number from starvation, others drowning after plunging into lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the installation is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Perspectives

This artwork also highlights the clear contrast between the modern understanding of energy as a commodity to be exploited for gain and survival and the Sámi worldview of energy as an natural power in creatures, humans, and nature. Tate Modern's legacy as a fossil fuel plant is connected to this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by Nordic countries. As they strive to be exemplars for renewable energy, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, water power facilities, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and traditions are threatened. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to defend yourself when the reasons are based on global sustainability," Sara comments. "Extractivism has adopted the language of ecology, but still it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to maintain practices of expenditure."

Individual Challenges

The artist and her relatives have themselves clashed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent policies on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's brother undertook a series of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the required reduction of his animals, apparently to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara produced a extended set of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive curtain of four hundred cranial remains, which was shown at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it hangs in the entrance.

The Role of Art in Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work seems the sole domain in which they can be heard by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|