🔗 Share this article

Guests to Tate Modern are accustomed to unexpected experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an man-made sun, slid down spiral slides, and observed robotic sea creatures floating through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the complex nose chambers of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a winding design inspired by the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Once inside, they can meander around or unwind on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to tribal seniors telling narratives and insights.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why choose the nasal structure? It may appear playful, but the installation honors a rarely recognized scientific wonder: scientists have discovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it breathes in by eighty degrees, allowing the creature to thrive in inhospitable Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "produces a perception of insignificance that you as a human being are not superior over nature." Sara is a ex- writer, children's author, and land defender, who is from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Possibly that fosters the potential to alter your perspective or spark some humbleness," she states.

A Tribute to Indigenous Heritage

The winding installation is one of several components in Sara's engaging commission honoring the culture, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi count about 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They have experienced discrimination, cultural suppression, and repression of their dialect by all four states. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi mythology and origin tale, the installation also draws attention to the people's challenges associated with the climate crisis, land dispossession, and external control.

Symbolism in Components

Along the long entrance incline, there's a towering, 26-meter formation of reindeer hides trapped by electrical wires. It represents a analogy for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this part of the installation, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an severe climatic event, whereby thick coatings of ice develop as fluctuating conditions melt and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' main cold-season nourishment, lichen. This phenomenon is a outcome of planetary warming, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than globally.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and joined Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they transported carts of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to distribute by hand. The herd crowded round us, scratching the frozen ground in vain attempts for mossy morsels. This costly and demanding method is having a drastic impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. However the choice is malnutrition. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are succumbing—some from hunger, others drowning after plunging into water bodies through prematurely melting ice. To some extent, the installation is a monument to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

The installation also underscores the sharp divergence between the modern interpretation of energy as a asset to be harnessed for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of energy as an innate essence in animals, individuals, and land. The gallery's history as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by regional governments. In their efforts to be exemplars for renewable energy, Nordic nations have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of windfarms, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and culture are at risk. "It's very difficult being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the arguments are grounded in saving the world," Sara comments. "Resource exploitation has adopted the discourse of sustainability, but still it's just striving to find alternative ways to continue habits of expenditure."

Family Challenges

Sara and her family have themselves clashed with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent rules on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's sibling initiated a set of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara produced a multi-year set of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal curtain of 400 cranial remains, which was exhibited at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it hangs in the lobby.

Art as Advocacy

For many Sámi, art is the sole domain in which they can be understood by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|