🔗 Share this article

Attendees to the renowned gallery are used to surprising experiences in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an simulated sun, glided down helter skelters, and witnessed robotic sea creatures drifting through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nose chambers of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this huge space—designed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a maze-like construction based on the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Inside, they can meander around or unwind on skins, listening on earphones to Sámi elders imparting narratives and insights.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It may sound whimsical, but the exhibit celebrates a rarely recognized scientific wonder: scientists have discovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it inhales by eighty degrees, enabling the creature to endure in harsh Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "generates a feeling of smallness that you as a human being are not superior over nature." The artist is a ex- journalist, writer for kids, and land defender, who is from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that fosters the possibility to alter your viewpoint or spark some humbleness," she adds.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The labyrinthine installation is among various features in Sara's engaging art project honoring the heritage, knowledge, and philosophy of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi count about 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They've experienced discrimination, forced assimilation, and suppression of their dialect by all four nations. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the work also spotlights the group's challenges associated with the environmental emergency, property rights, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Elements

Along the extended entrance slope, there's a looming, 26-metre formation of reindeer hides trapped by electrical wires. It serves as a metaphor for the political and economic systems restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this part of the installation, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, whereby dense layers of ice appear as fluctuating weather liquefy and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' main cold-season sustenance, lichen. This phenomenon is a outcome of planetary warming, which is happening up to four times faster in the Far North than globally.

Previously, I visited Sara in a remote town during a icy season and joined Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they hauled trailers of food pellets on to the barren frozen landscape to provide through labor. The herd crowded round us, digging the frozen ground in futility for lichen-covered morsels. This expensive and laborious procedure is having a drastic effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the alternative is death. As goavvi winters become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—some from hunger, others suffocating after plunging into lakes and rivers through prematurely melting ice. To some extent, the art is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

The sculpture also highlights the clear difference between the industrial understanding of electricity as a resource to be harnessed for gain and survival and the Sámi philosophy of life force as an inherent life force in animals, individuals, and the environment. Tate Modern's legacy as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by Nordic countries. In their efforts to be leaders for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, hydroelectric dams, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their human rights, incomes, and traditions are at risk. "It's hard being such a limited population to stand your ground when the justifications are grounded in saving the world," Sara observes. "Mining practices has adopted the rhetoric of ecology, but yet it's just attempting to find better ways to continue practices of consumption."

Individual Struggles

She and her relatives have personally conflicted with the national administration over its increasingly stringent regulations on animal husbandry. Previously, Sara's brother embarked on a series of unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, apparently to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara created a extended set of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge curtain of numerous reindeer skulls, which was shown at the the event Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it is displayed in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Awareness

Among the community, creative work appears the exclusive domain in which they can be listened to by outsiders. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|