🔗 Share this article

Guests to Tate Modern are accustomed to surprising displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an artificial sun, slid down amusement rides, and witnessed automated jellyfish hovering through the air. Yet this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nose passages of a reindeer. The current artist commission for this immense space—created by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a winding construction based on the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nasal passages. Once inside, they can stroll around or unwind on skins, tuning in on earphones to tribal seniors telling stories and insights.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It could appear playful, but the exhibit celebrates a rarely recognized natural marvel: scientists have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it inhales by 80°C, helping the animal to endure in extreme Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "produces a feeling of smallness that you as a individual are not in control over nature." Sara is a former journalist, writer for kids, and land defender, who comes from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that creates the potential to shift your viewpoint or spark some humbleness," she adds.

A Tribute to Traditional Ways

The winding design is part of a components in Sara's absorbing exhibition showcasing the traditions, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They've experienced persecution, forced assimilation, and eradication of their dialect by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the work also highlights the community's issues relating to the climate crisis, property rights, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Components

At the long access slope, there's a soaring, 26-metre sculpture of pelts ensnared by power and light cables. It can be read as a analogy for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this component of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein solid layers of ice develop as fluctuating temperatures melt and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary cold-season sustenance, fungus. Goavvi is a outcome of planetary warming, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Far North than globally.

Previously, I met with Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they transported carts of animal nutrition on to the exposed tundra to dispense manually. These animals surrounded round us, pawing the icy ground in futility for vegetative bits. This resource-intensive and laborious process is having a drastic effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the alternative is malnutrition. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are dying—some from hunger, others drowning after sinking in lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the work is a monument to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Perspectives

The installation also emphasizes the clear difference between the western view of electricity as a asset to be harnessed for profit and survival and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an inherent power in animals, humans, and nature. This venue's past as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be standard bearers for renewable energy, these states have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their fundamental freedoms, livelihoods, and culture are endangered. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to stand your ground when the arguments are grounded in saving the world," Sara comments. "Extractivism has appropriated the discourse of ecology, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find alternative ways to maintain practices of expenditure."

Personal Struggles

The artist and her family have themselves disagreed with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter policies on herding. Previously, Sara's sibling initiated a set of unsuccessful court actions over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara created a multi-year collection of creations named Pile O'Sápmi including a massive curtain of four hundred animal bones, which was displayed at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

For many Sámi, art appears the sole realm in which they can be understood by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|