🔗 Share this article

Attendees to Tate Modern are used to surprising displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have basked under an man-made sun, descended down amusement rides, and witnessed automated sea creatures hovering through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nose passages of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this immense space—developed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a winding construction inspired by the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose cavities. Once inside, they can wander around or chill out on skins, tuning in on earphones to Sámi elders telling stories and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It could sound whimsical, but the installation honors a rarely recognized biological feat: researchers have discovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it breathes in by 80°C, allowing the creature to endure in harsh Arctic climates. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "creates a sense of insignificance that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." She is a former writer, young adult author, and rights advocate, who is from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Maybe that creates the potential to shift your outlook or evoke some humbleness," she states.

A Tribute to Indigenous Heritage

The maze-like design is among various components in Sara's engaging exhibition honoring the traditions, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi number about 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They've faced oppression, cultural suppression, and eradication of their dialect by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the work also draws attention to the people's challenges associated with the climate crisis, property rights, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Elements

On the extended entrance incline, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot structure of pelts ensnared by power and light cables. It represents a analogy for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this section of the installation, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, in which solid coatings of ice develop as fluctuating temperatures thaw and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' main winter nourishment, moss. The condition is a consequence of planetary warming, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than globally.

Previously, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they hauled containers of food pellets on to the barren frozen landscape to distribute through labor. The reindeer crowded round us, digging the slippery ground in futility for lichen-covered morsels. This costly and labour-intensive process is having a drastic influence on herding practices—and on the animals' natural survival. However the other option is death. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—a number from starvation, others drowning after plunging into streams through prematurely melting ice. To some extent, the work is a monument to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm introducing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

This artwork also highlights the clear divergence between the industrial view of energy as a resource to be utilized for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an natural power in creatures, humans, and nature. The gallery's past as a fossil fuel plant is linked with this, as is what the Sámi consider environmental exploitation by Nordic countries. As they strive to be standard bearers for renewable energy, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and culture are endangered. "It's challenging being such a small minority to defend yourself when the justifications are based on environmental protection," Sara observes. "Extractivism has appropriated the discourse of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to persist in habits of use."

Individual Struggles

Sara and her family have themselves clashed with the state authorities over its ever-stricter regulations on herding. Previously, Sara's sibling embarked on a set of unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, supposedly to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara developed a four-year series of creations called Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge drape of numerous animal bones, which was displayed at the the show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the lobby.

Art as Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, visual expression is 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|