🔗 Share this article

Guests to the renowned gallery are used to unexpected encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've basked under an man-made sun, slid down spiral slides, and seen AI-powered sea creatures floating through the air. However this marks the first time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nose chambers of a reindeer. The latest artistic project for this cavernous space—created by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a labyrinthine design based on the expanded interior of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Once inside, they can wander around or relax on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to tribal seniors telling stories and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It could sound quirky, but the installation celebrates a obscure scientific wonder: scientists have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it breathes in by eighty degrees, helping the animal to endure in extreme Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara explains, "produces a sense of insignificance that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." She is a former reporter, young adult author, and land defender, who comes from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that creates the chance to shift your viewpoint or evoke some modesty," she adds.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The labyrinthine installation is one of several features in Sara's absorbing exhibition showcasing the traditions, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count about 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They've experienced oppression, cultural suppression, and suppression of their tongue by all four nations. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the installation also highlights the community's issues relating to the climate crisis, property rights, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Elements

On the extended entrance slope, there's a soaring, 26-meter formation of pelts trapped by utility lines. It can be read as a analogy for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Part pylon, part heavenly staircase, this part of the exhibit, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, wherein solid sheets of ice form as fluctuating conditions liquefy and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' main winter food, fungus. The condition is a outcome of planetary warming, which is taking place up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than elsewhere.

Previously, I visited Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they hauled trailers of supplementary feed on to the exposed tundra to dispense by hand. These animals surrounded round us, digging the slippery ground in vain for vegetative bits. This costly and labour-intensive procedure is having a drastic effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. However the choice is death. As these icy periods become routine, reindeer are perishing—some from lack of food, others submerging after falling into lakes and rivers through prematurely melting ice. To some extent, the installation is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of elements, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Perspectives

The sculpture also underscores the stark divergence between the western interpretation of power as a resource to be utilized for profit and survival and the Sámi worldview of life force as an innate life force in creatures, humans, and land. This venue's past as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by regional governments. While attempting to be exemplars for renewable energy, these states have locked horns with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, water power facilities, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi argue their legal protections, livelihoods, and way of life are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to stand your ground when the justifications are based on saving the world," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the discourse of ecology, but yet it's just striving to find better ways to maintain patterns of consumption."

Personal Conflicts

She and her kin have personally conflicted with the national administration over its tightening regulations on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's brother initiated a set of unsuccessful legal cases over the forced culling of his livestock, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a extended collection of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge drape of numerous cranial remains, which was shown at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it resides in the lobby.

The Role of Art in Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work appears the only domain in which they can be listened to by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|