🔗 Share this article

Attendees to the renowned gallery are familiar to surprising displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've basked under an man-made sun, glided down spiral slides, and observed automated sea creatures drifting through the air. Yet this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nasal chambers of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this immense space—developed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a labyrinthine construction based on the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nasal passages. Inside, they can meander around or chill out on skins, tuning in on earphones to tribal seniors imparting stories and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It could sound playful, but the installation celebrates a rarely recognized scientific wonder: experts have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it breathes in by eighty degrees, allowing the animal to survive in harsh Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "generates a perception of inferiority that you as a person are not superior over nature." The artist is a ex- writer, writer for kids, and environmental activist, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that creates the possibility to change your perspective or evoke some humbleness," she states.

A Tribute to Traditional Ways

The maze-like structure is among various elements in Sara's absorbing commission showcasing the culture, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They have faced persecution, integration policies, and repression of their tongue by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the art also spotlights the people's struggles connected to the global warming, property rights, and external control.

Metaphor in Components

On the long entrance ramp, there's a soaring, 26-metre sculpture of skins entangled by power and light cables. It represents a metaphor for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Part pylon, part spiritual ascent, this part of the installation, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein solid coatings of ice develop as varying temperatures liquefy and ice over the snow, locking in the reindeers' main cold-season food, lichen. The condition is a consequence of climate change, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than globally.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi herders on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they hauled trailers of food pellets on to the wind-scoured tundra to distribute manually. The herd gathered round us, scratching the slippery ground in futility for mossy pieces. This expensive and demanding procedure is having a significant effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. However the choice is death. As goavvi winters become frequent, reindeer are dying—a number from starvation, others submerging after falling into lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the art is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

The installation also highlights the clear divergence between the industrial understanding of energy as a asset to be exploited for profit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of life force as an natural life force in animals, people, and land. The gallery's legacy as a coal and oil power station is connected to this, as is what the Sámi consider eco-imperialism by Nordic countries. While attempting to be standard bearers for clean sources, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the development of wind energy projects, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their human rights, livelihoods, and way of life are at risk. "It's hard being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the justifications are grounded in environmental protection," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has adopted the discourse of sustainability, but yet it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to continue habits of consumption."

Personal Challenges

Sara and her relatives have themselves disagreed with the state authorities over its ever-stricter policies on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's sibling undertook a set of unsuccessful court actions over the required reduction of his herd, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a multi-year series of creations named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive drape of numerous cranial remains, which was exhibited at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it hangs in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For many Sámi, visual expression seems the exclusive realm in which they can be heard by outsiders. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|