🔗 Share this article

Attendees to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have basked under an man-made sun, glided down amusement rides, and seen AI-powered jellyfish floating through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this immense space—designed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a maze-like construction modeled after the expanded interior of a reindeer's nasal airways. Inside, they can wander around or relax on pelts, tuning in on earphones to community leaders telling narratives and insights.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It could sound playful, but the installation celebrates a obscure scientific wonder: scientists have discovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it breathes in by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the animal to survive in extreme Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "creates a feeling of inferiority that you as a person are not dominant over nature." The artist is a ex- writer, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that creates the chance to alter your outlook or trigger some humbleness," she states.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The winding structure is part of a elements in Sara's immersive art project showcasing the heritage, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi count about 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They have endured persecution, integration policies, and repression of their tongue by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the work also spotlights the group's challenges relating to the climate crisis, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Components

At the lengthy entrance slope, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot formation of skins entangled by power and light cables. It serves as a metaphor for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this component of the artwork, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which dense sheets of ice appear as changing temperatures thaw and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary cold-season sustenance, moss. Goavvi is a outcome of climate change, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than globally.

A few years back, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they carried containers of animal nutrition on to the barren frozen landscape to distribute through labor. The herd gathered round us, scratching the frozen ground in vain attempts for vegetative morsels. This costly and laborious process is having a drastic impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the alternative is starvation. As these icy periods become routine, reindeer are perishing—some from starvation, others submerging after sinking in water bodies through prematurely melting ice. To some extent, the work is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

This artwork also highlights the stark difference between the modern interpretation of energy as a commodity to be exploited for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an natural essence in animals, humans, and land. This venue's legacy as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be standard bearers for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have clashed with the Sámi over the construction of windfarms, river barriers, and extraction sites on their traditional territory; the Sámi argue their human rights, livelihoods, and culture are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a tiny group to protect your rights when the arguments are rooted in saving the world," Sara comments. "Mining practices has co-opted the discourse of ecology, but nonetheless it's just attempting to find better ways to continue practices of use."

Family Conflicts

The artist and her kin have themselves clashed with the national administration over its tightening policies on animal husbandry. Previously, Sara's brother embarked on a sequence of finally failed legal cases over the forced culling of his animals, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara produced a extended collection of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi including a huge screen of four hundred cranial remains, which was exhibited at the the show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it resides in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Activism

Among the community, visual expression seems the exclusive realm in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|