🔗 Share this article

Attendees to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They have basked under an artificial sun, slid down amusement rides, and seen automated jellyfish hovering through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nasal chambers of a reindeer. The latest artistic project for this cavernous space—developed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a maze-like construction based on the expanded interior of a reindeer's nasal airways. Once inside, they can wander around or unwind on skins, tuning in on headphones to Sámi elders telling tales and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It could sound playful, but the installation celebrates a little-known scientific wonder: researchers have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it inhales by eighty degrees, allowing the creature to thrive in harsh Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "generates a perception of smallness that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." She is a ex- journalist, children's author, and land defender, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Possibly that generates the potential to alter your perspective or evoke some humbleness," she adds.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The labyrinthine installation is part of a components in Sara's engaging commission honoring the culture, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They have endured persecution, forced assimilation, and repression of their language by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the work also spotlights the group's issues associated with the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Materials

On the lengthy entrance ramp, there's a looming, 26-metre structure of skins trapped by electrical wires. It serves as a metaphor for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this section of the artwork, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which dense layers of ice develop as varying temperatures thaw and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' main winter sustenance, moss. This phenomenon is a result of climate change, which is occurring up to four times faster in the Arctic than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they transported carts of supplementary feed on to the barren Arctic plains to provide through labor. These animals surrounded round us, scratching the slippery ground in vain for vegetative pieces. This resource-intensive and demanding method is having a significant effect on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. Yet the other option is malnutrition. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are dying—a number from hunger, others submerging after plunging into water bodies through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the installation is a memorial to them. "With the layering of materials, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

This artwork also underscores the sharp divergence between the western interpretation of energy as a resource to be exploited for profit and survival and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an natural essence in animals, humans, and land. The gallery's past as a coal and oil power station is connected to this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by regional governments. As they strive to be exemplars for clean sources, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of windfarms, water power facilities, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their legal protections, incomes, and culture are at risk. "It's challenging being such a small minority to defend yourself when the arguments are based on saving the world," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the language of ecology, but nonetheless it's just attempting to find better ways to maintain habits of use."

Individual Struggles

She and her family have themselves disagreed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent rules on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's sibling embarked on a sequence of finally failed legal cases over the required reduction of his herd, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a four-year collection of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal drape of 400 cranial remains, which was exhibited at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the entryway.

The Role of Art in Activism

Among the community, art appears the exclusive sphere in which they can be heard by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|