🔗 Share this article

Visitors to Tate Modern are used to surprising encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an man-made sun, glided down spiral slides, and witnessed AI-powered sea creatures drifting through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this cavernous space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a labyrinthine construction inspired by the expanded inside of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Inside, they can stroll around or chill out on reindeer hides, tuning in on earphones to Sámi elders sharing narratives and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It might appear playful, but the exhibit honors a little-known scientific wonder: scientists have discovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the animal to thrive in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "generates a feeling of smallness that you as a human being are not superior over nature." Sara is a former journalist, young adult author, and environmental activist, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Possibly that fosters the possibility to alter your viewpoint or evoke some modesty," she adds.

A Tribute to Traditional Ways

The winding design is among various components in Sara's engaging exhibition honoring the traditions, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They've endured persecution, integration policies, and repression of their language by all four states. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the work also highlights the group's issues relating to the climate crisis, loss of territory, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Materials

Along the extended entrance slope, there's a soaring, 26-meter structure of reindeer hides trapped by utility lines. It represents a analogy for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part spiritual ascent, this component of the installation, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein dense sheets of ice form as varying temperatures liquefy and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' key cold-season food, fungus. Goavvi is a consequence of global heating, which is taking place up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than in other regions.

Previously, I met with Sara in a remote town during a icy season and accompanied Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they carried containers of food pellets on to the exposed frozen landscape to distribute through labor. The reindeer surrounded round us, digging the slippery ground in futility for lichen-covered morsels. This expensive and demanding method is having a drastic influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. However the choice is death. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are dying—a number from starvation, others suffocating after sinking in water bodies through prematurely melting ice. To some extent, the installation is a memorial to them. "With the layering of materials, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

This artwork also highlights the stark divergence between the modern interpretation of electricity as a commodity to be utilized for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an natural life force in creatures, people, and the environment. Tate Modern's history as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by regional governments. While attempting to be exemplars for clean sources, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, river barriers, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi argue their human rights, livelihoods, and culture are threatened. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to stand your ground when the arguments are rooted in saving the world," Sara comments. "Mining practices has co-opted the discourse of sustainability, but yet it's just striving to find better ways to persist in practices of consumption."

Family Struggles

Sara and her family have personally clashed with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent policies on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's sibling undertook a series of unsuccessful legal cases over the forced culling of his livestock, supposedly to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara produced a four-year set of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi including a massive curtain of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was shown at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it resides in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Activism

For many Sámi, art is the only domain in which they can be heard by outsiders. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|