🔗 Share this article

Guests to Tate Modern are used to surprising displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an simulated sun, slid down spiral slides, and observed robotic jellyfish hovering through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nose cavities of a reindeer. The current artist commission for this huge space—created by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages patrons into a labyrinthine design inspired by the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose cavities. Upon entering, they can wander around or unwind on pelts, tuning in on headphones to community leaders imparting narratives and knowledge.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why the nose? It could seem quirky, but the artwork pays tribute to a little-known biological feat: scientists have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it takes in by 80°C, enabling the creature to thrive in extreme Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "produces a feeling of smallness that you as a person are not superior over nature." Sara is a former writer, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who hails from a pastoral family in northern Norway. "Possibly that generates the potential to alter your perspective or trigger some modesty," she states.

A Celebration to Indigenous Heritage

The winding structure is one of several features in Sara's engaging art project honoring the traditions, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They've faced persecution, integration policies, and eradication of their tongue by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the work also spotlights the community's issues connected to the global warming, loss of territory, and external control.

Metaphor in Materials

At the long access incline, there's a looming, 26-meter sculpture of skins ensnared by utility lines. It represents a metaphor for the societal frameworks restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this component of the artwork, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which solid sheets of ice develop as varying temperatures thaw and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' primary winter nourishment, fungus. Goavvi is a result of climate change, which is occurring up to four times faster in the Far North than globally.

A few years back, I met with Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and went with Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they transported carts of supplementary feed on to the barren Arctic plains to provide through labor. The reindeer gathered round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain for lichen-covered morsels. This resource-intensive and demanding process is having a significant influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. But the choice is death. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are dying—a number from hunger, others submerging after sinking in streams through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the work is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Perspectives

The sculpture also emphasizes the sharp divergence between the industrial interpretation of power as a asset to be exploited for profit and existence and the Sámi worldview of energy as an inherent power in animals, humans, and land. Tate Modern's history as a fossil fuel plant is connected to this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be leaders for renewable energy, these states have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, river barriers, and extraction sites on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, livelihoods, and way of life are at risk. "It's challenging being such a small minority to protect your rights when the justifications are grounded in saving the world," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has adopted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but still it's just striving to find more suitable ways to continue habits of expenditure."

Individual Struggles

The artist and her kin have personally disagreed with the national administration over its ever-stricter regulations on herding. In 2016, Sara's sibling undertook a series of unsuccessful court actions over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara produced a four-year set of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive drape of numerous cranial remains, which was displayed at the the show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it hangs in the entryway.

Art as Advocacy

For many Sámi, art appears the only sphere in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|