🔗 Share this article

Guests to Tate Modern are familiar to surprising displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an artificial sun, descended down helter skelters, and witnessed robotic sea creatures drifting through the air. But this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nose chambers of a reindeer. The current artist commission for this cavernous space—designed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes patrons into a labyrinthine design based on the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nasal airways. Once inside, they can stroll around or chill out on skins, tuning in on earphones to community leaders imparting tales and insights.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It may sound quirky, but the installation honors a little-known biological feat: scientists have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the creature to endure in extreme Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "creates a feeling of inferiority that you as a person are not superior over nature." The artist is a former journalist, writer for kids, and land defender, who hails from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that creates the chance to shift your viewpoint or evoke some modesty," she adds.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The maze-like design is part of a elements in Sara's engaging commission showcasing the traditions, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They've experienced oppression, cultural suppression, and repression of their dialect by all four states. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the work also draws attention to the people's struggles relating to the environmental emergency, property rights, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Components

Along the lengthy entrance incline, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot sculpture of reindeer hides ensnared by power and light cables. It can be read as a symbol for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part heavenly staircase, this section of the installation, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein dense sheets of ice develop as fluctuating temperatures liquefy and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' key winter food, lichen. The condition is a outcome of climate change, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Far North than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I met with Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they hauled trailers of food pellets on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to dispense by hand. The reindeer crowded round us, digging the slippery ground in vain attempts for mossy bits. This expensive and demanding method is having a significant impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the alternative is death. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are perishing—some from starvation, others suffocating after falling into streams through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the art is a monument to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Perspectives

This artwork also underscores the sharp divergence between the modern interpretation of electricity as a resource to be utilized for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi outlook of energy as an innate life force in animals, people, and the environment. This venue's past as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by regional governments. In their efforts to be leaders for clean sources, Nordic nations have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, livelihoods, and culture are endangered. "It's challenging being such a limited population to protect your rights when the reasons are grounded in saving the world," Sara comments. "Resource exploitation has adopted the rhetoric of ecology, but nonetheless it's just attempting to find alternative ways to persist in patterns of use."

Family Conflicts

She and her kin have themselves clashed with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter rules on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's sibling embarked on a set of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the forced culling of his herd, supposedly to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a extended collection of creations named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a colossal drape of numerous animal bones, which was exhibited at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the public gallery, where it is displayed in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, visual expression is the exclusive domain in which they can be listened to by outsiders. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|