🔗 Share this article

Visitors to Tate Modern are accustomed to unexpected encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an simulated sun, slid down spiral slides, and seen AI-powered sea creatures floating through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nose cavities of a reindeer. The newest artistic project for this cavernous space—designed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a maze-like design inspired by the expanded interior of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Upon entering, they can meander around or unwind on skins, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors telling stories and wisdom.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It could seem playful, but the installation pays tribute to a little-known natural marvel: researchers have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the surrounding air it inhales by eighty degrees, allowing the animal to endure in harsh Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "produces a perception of inferiority that you as a human being are not in control over nature." She is a former writer, children's author, and rights advocate, who hails from a pastoral family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that generates the chance to alter your perspective or evoke some modesty," she states.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The winding design is among various elements in Sara's immersive art project celebrating the traditions, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Partially migratory, the Sámi total about 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They've endured persecution, cultural suppression, and repression of their language by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the art also spotlights the community's challenges connected to the climate crisis, loss of territory, and external control.

Symbolism in Materials

Along the lengthy entrance ramp, there's a soaring, 26-metre formation of reindeer hides ensnared by utility lines. It represents a analogy for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this component of the installation, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, wherein dense layers of ice form as changing conditions melt and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' main cold-season nourishment, fungus. Goavvi is a consequence of planetary warming, which is happening up to four times faster in the Arctic than globally.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they transported trailers of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to distribute manually. These animals surrounded round us, pawing the icy ground in vain for lichen-covered morsels. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive process is having a severe impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. However the other option is starvation. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are dying—a number from hunger, others suffocating after falling into streams through unstable frozen surfaces. In a sense, the installation is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of elements, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

The sculpture also highlights the sharp divergence between the industrial view of power as a resource to be utilized for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an inherent power in animals, humans, and the environment. Tate Modern's legacy as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be exemplars for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of wind energy projects, hydroelectric dams, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi contend their human rights, ways of life, and traditions are endangered. "It's hard being such a small minority to defend yourself when the reasons are rooted in saving the world," Sara notes. "Mining practices has adopted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but still it's just attempting to find alternative ways to continue practices of use."

Personal Struggles

The artist and her family have themselves clashed with the state authorities over its ever-stricter policies on herding. In 2016, Sara's sibling undertook a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the forced culling of his herd, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a four-year collection of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi including a huge curtain of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the 2017's art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it resides in the entrance.

The Role of Art in Awareness

For many Sámi, creative work seems the exclusive realm in which they can be listened to by outsiders. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|