🔗 Share this article

Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to surprising displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have basked under an artificial sun, descended down amusement rides, and observed robotic jellyfish drifting through the air. However this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nasal chambers of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this cavernous space—designed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a winding construction modeled after the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose passages. Upon entering, they can stroll around or chill out on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to community leaders telling narratives and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It may sound whimsical, but the installation pays tribute to a obscure scientific wonder: researchers have discovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it inhales by eighty degrees, enabling the creature to endure in extreme Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "generates a feeling of smallness that you as a human being are not in control over nature." The artist is a former journalist, young adult author, and land defender, who is from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Maybe that creates the possibility to shift your viewpoint or spark some humbleness," she states.

An Homage to Indigenous Heritage

The labyrinthine installation is among various elements in Sara's absorbing commission showcasing the traditions, knowledge, and philosophy of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They've experienced persecution, cultural suppression, and eradication of their tongue by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the art also draws attention to the community's struggles connected to the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and colonialism.

Meaning in Elements

Along the lengthy entry incline, there's a soaring, 26-meter formation of reindeer hides trapped by electrical wires. It serves as a symbol for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this section of the exhibit, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby dense coatings of ice form as changing temperatures liquefy and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' main cold-season sustenance, moss. This phenomenon is a result of planetary warming, which is happening up to four times faster in the Arctic than in other regions.

Previously, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they transported carts of animal nutrition on to the barren frozen landscape to distribute through labor. The reindeer crowded round us, digging the slippery ground in vain attempts for vegetative bits. This expensive and demanding process is having a drastic effect on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the alternative is malnutrition. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—some from hunger, others submerging after plunging into streams through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the art is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

The sculpture also highlights the clear contrast between the western interpretation of electricity as a asset to be utilized for profit and survival and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an natural life force in creatures, individuals, and the environment. Tate Modern's legacy as a fossil fuel plant is connected to this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by regional governments. In their efforts to be exemplars for sustainable power, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, river barriers, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi assert their human rights, livelihoods, and culture are at risk. "It's challenging being such a limited population to stand your ground when the reasons are rooted in saving the world," Sara observes. "Mining practices has co-opted the rhetoric of ecology, but still it's just striving to find better ways to maintain patterns of consumption."

Family Challenges

She and her family have themselves conflicted with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent rules on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's brother undertook a series of finally failed court actions over the forced culling of his livestock, supposedly to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara developed a four-year collection of creations named Pile O'Sápmi including a massive screen of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was shown at the the event Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it hangs in the lobby.

Art as Advocacy

For numerous Indigenous people, art appears the only realm in which they can be heard by people of other nations. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|