🔗 Share this article

Visitors to the renowned gallery are used to unexpected displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an artificial sun, slid down amusement rides, and seen automated sea creatures drifting through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nasal passages of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this cavernous space—developed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a winding structure inspired by the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose cavities. Inside, they can wander around or unwind on pelts, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors telling tales and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It might appear playful, but the installation celebrates a rarely recognized natural marvel: experts have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it inhales by 80°C, enabling the animal to survive in harsh Arctic climates. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "generates a feeling of smallness that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." Sara is a ex- reporter, children's author, and environmental activist, who comes from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that creates the chance to change your viewpoint or spark some humbleness," she states.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The winding installation is one of several components in Sara's absorbing art project celebrating the heritage, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number about 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They've endured discrimination, cultural suppression, and eradication of their tongue by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the art also draws attention to the group's challenges associated with the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Meaning in Elements

Along the extended access ramp, there's a soaring, 26-meter structure of pelts ensnared by power and light cables. It serves as a analogy for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this section of the exhibit, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which solid sheets of ice appear as varying conditions liquefy and ice over the snow, locking in the reindeers' primary cold-season food, moss. Goavvi is a result of climate change, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Polar region than globally.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a icy season and went with Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they hauled trailers of supplementary feed on to the exposed Arctic plains to provide manually. The herd crowded round us, digging the icy ground in vain attempts for mossy bits. This costly and labour-intensive procedure is having a significant effect on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. However the other option is death. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are succumbing—some from lack of food, others submerging after sinking in water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the work is a tribute to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm introducing the condition to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Perspectives

The sculpture also underscores the clear divergence between the western interpretation of energy as a commodity to be exploited for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an inherent power in animals, people, and land. This venue's past as a fossil fuel plant is linked with this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by regional governments. In their efforts to be standard bearers for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their human rights, incomes, and way of life are endangered. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to stand your ground when the arguments are grounded in environmental protection," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has adopted the rhetoric of ecology, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to continue patterns of use."

Personal Struggles

The artist and her kin have personally clashed with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent rules on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's brother initiated a sequence of unsuccessful legal cases over the forced culling of his animals, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara developed a four-year series of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi including a massive curtain of four hundred animal bones, which was shown at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the public gallery, where it resides in the lobby.

The Role of Art in Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, art seems the sole sphere in which they can be understood by the global community. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|