🔗 Share this article

Guests to the renowned gallery are used to unusual displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an simulated sun, slid down helter skelters, and seen automated sea creatures floating through the air. But this marks the inaugural time they will be immersing themselves in the detailed nose cavities of a reindeer. The current artist commission for this huge space—designed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a winding construction based on the expanded inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Inside, they can stroll around or chill out on skins, tuning in on headphones to Sámi elders telling stories and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why choose the nasal structure? It may sound whimsical, but the artwork honors a little-known natural marvel: scientists have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the ambient air it inhales by 80 degrees celsius, allowing the creature to survive in extreme Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "creates a perception of smallness that you as a human being are not superior over nature." The artist is a ex- reporter, children's author, and land defender, who comes from a pastoral family in northern Norway. "Possibly that fosters the potential to alter your perspective or spark some humbleness," she states.

A Tribute to Traditional Ways

The maze-like structure is one of several components in Sara's immersive commission showcasing the heritage, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They've faced discrimination, forced assimilation, and suppression of their tongue by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi mythology and origin tale, the art also highlights the community's challenges associated with the global warming, land dispossession, and external control.

Symbolism in Elements

On the extended access incline, there's a looming, 26-metre structure of skins entangled by electrical wires. It can be read as a symbol for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part heavenly staircase, this part of the artwork, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, in which dense sheets of ice develop as varying weather thaw and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' main cold-season food, lichen. The condition is a outcome of planetary warming, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than globally.

A few years back, I visited Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they hauled carts of supplementary feed on to the exposed frozen landscape to distribute by hand. These animals gathered round us, scratching the icy ground in futility for mossy pieces. This resource-intensive and laborious procedure is having a severe impact on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the alternative is starvation. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—a number from lack of food, others drowning after sinking in streams through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the work is a tribute to them. "With the layering of materials, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

This artwork also highlights the clear difference between the industrial understanding of energy as a resource to be exploited for gain and survival and the Sámi outlook of life force as an innate life force in animals, individuals, and land. Tate Modern's past as a fossil fuel plant is linked with this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by regional governments. As they strive to be leaders for sustainable power, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, water power facilities, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their legal protections, ways of life, and traditions are threatened. "It's very difficult being such a tiny group to stand your ground when the justifications are rooted in global sustainability," Sara comments. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the discourse of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just striving to find more suitable ways to continue habits of use."

Family Conflicts

The artist and her relatives have themselves conflicted with the national administration over its ever-stricter regulations on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's brother undertook a set of finally failed legal cases over the forced culling of his livestock, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara produced a multi-year set of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi including a massive curtain of numerous animal bones, which was shown at the 2017 event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it hangs in the lobby.

The Role of Art in Awareness

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