🔗 Share this article

Attendees to Tate Modern are used to surprising displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They have basked under an simulated sun, descended down helter skelters, and observed automated sea creatures hovering through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nose cavities of a reindeer. The newest artistic project for this huge space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a labyrinthine design inspired by the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Once inside, they can stroll around or chill out on pelts, listening on headphones to community leaders telling narratives and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It may sound quirky, but the exhibit celebrates a obscure biological feat: researchers have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the ambient air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the animal to thrive in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "produces a sense of insignificance that you as a human being are not superior over nature." The artist is a former reporter, young adult author, and rights advocate, who is from a pastoral family in northern Norway. "Possibly that generates the potential to alter your viewpoint or evoke some humility," she states.

A Tribute to Indigenous Heritage

The winding structure is among various features in Sara's engaging exhibition celebrating the traditions, understanding, and philosophy of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total about 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They've faced discrimination, forced assimilation, and repression of their tongue by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the art also spotlights the people's challenges relating to the global warming, loss of territory, and colonialism.

Meaning in Components

Along the extended access slope, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot sculpture of pelts ensnared by electrical wires. It can be read as a analogy for the societal frameworks constraining the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this component of the exhibit, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an severe climatic event, in which solid coatings of ice develop as changing conditions melt and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' main winter sustenance, fungus. This phenomenon is a consequence of climate change, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Polar region than globally.

Previously, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they transported containers of food pellets on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to distribute by hand. These animals crowded round us, digging the frozen ground in vain attempts for mossy morsels. This resource-intensive and demanding method is having a significant influence on herding practices—and on the animals' natural survival. However the choice is death. As goavvi winters become frequent, reindeer are dying—a number from lack of food, others suffocating after plunging into lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the installation is a monument to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

The installation also emphasizes the stark divergence between the western interpretation of power as a asset to be exploited for profit and existence and the Sámi outlook of energy as an inherent power in creatures, individuals, and nature. Tate Modern's past as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by Nordic countries. While attempting to be leaders for clean sources, these states have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and mines on their traditional territory; the Sámi contend their human rights, livelihoods, and traditions are at risk. "It's challenging being such a limited population to protect your rights when the arguments are grounded in global sustainability," Sara notes. "Extractivism has co-opted the rhetoric of sustainability, but yet it's just striving to find better ways to continue habits of consumption."

Family Challenges

Sara and her kin have themselves clashed with the national administration over its tightening regulations on herding. A few years ago, Sara's brother undertook a sequence of finally failed lawsuits over the required reduction of his herd, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara created a multi-year series of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal curtain of four hundred cranial remains, which was displayed at the the event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the public gallery, where it hangs in the entrance.

Art as Awareness

Among the community, creative work seems the exclusive domain in which they can be understood by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|