🔗 Share this article

Attendees to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They've basked under an man-made sun, slid down spiral slides, and seen AI-powered jellyfish floating through the air. However this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nose chambers of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this cavernous space—created by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a labyrinthine construction based on the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nose passages. Inside, they can meander around or unwind on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to community leaders imparting narratives and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why the nose? It may appear quirky, but the exhibit pays tribute to a rarely recognized scientific wonder: scientists have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it breathes in by eighty degrees, enabling the animal to endure in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "produces a perception of inferiority that you as a human being are not superior over nature." Sara is a former journalist, children's author, and environmental activist, who comes from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Possibly that fosters the possibility to shift your viewpoint or trigger some humbleness," she continues.

A Tribute to Traditional Ways

The labyrinthine structure is part of a elements in Sara's engaging commission honoring the heritage, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total about 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They have faced discrimination, integration policies, and suppression of their dialect by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the art also spotlights the group's challenges associated with the global warming, property rights, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Components

Along the long entrance slope, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot structure of reindeer hides ensnared by utility lines. It serves as a metaphor for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part heavenly staircase, this section of the exhibit, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby dense coatings of ice develop as fluctuating temperatures thaw and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary winter nourishment, moss. The condition is a outcome of climate change, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and went with Sámi herders on their motorized sleds in freezing temperatures as they transported trailers of food pellets on to the exposed Arctic plains to distribute manually. The reindeer surrounded round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain for vegetative pieces. This costly and laborious process is having a severe effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. However the other option is death. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—some from hunger, others submerging after falling into water bodies through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the art is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of elements, in a way I'm introducing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

The installation also underscores the sharp contrast between the modern interpretation of power as a resource to be harnessed for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi worldview of energy as an inherent essence in animals, individuals, and nature. Tate Modern's history as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider eco-imperialism by Nordic countries. While attempting to be exemplars for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, river barriers, and extraction sites on their traditional territory; the Sámi contend their human rights, incomes, and traditions are threatened. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to stand your ground when the arguments are grounded in saving the world," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has adopted the rhetoric of ecology, but yet it's just striving to find more suitable ways to continue practices of consumption."

Personal Challenges

Sara and her family have themselves clashed with the state authorities over its increasingly stringent policies on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's sibling undertook a sequence of unsuccessful court actions over the required reduction of his animals, apparently to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara developed a extended set of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge curtain of numerous reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it resides in the entrance.

The Role of Art in Advocacy

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