Guests to Tate Modern are accustomed to unusual displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They've basked under an man-made sun, descended down helter skelters, and witnessed automated sea creatures drifting through the air. But this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nose passages of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this huge space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a winding design based on the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Once inside, they can wander around or relax on pelts, tuning in on headphones to Sámi elders imparting narratives and insights.
What's the focus on the nose? It might sound whimsical, but the exhibit pays tribute to a rarely recognized scientific wonder: researchers have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it breathes in by 80 degrees celsius, allowing the animal to survive in extreme Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "generates a sense of smallness that you as a individual are not in control over nature." Sara is a ex- reporter, children's author, and rights advocate, who is from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that creates the possibility to shift your viewpoint or evoke some humility," she continues.
The maze-like structure is one of several features in Sara's absorbing commission honoring the culture, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They've faced discrimination, integration policies, and eradication of their tongue by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the installation also spotlights the group's issues associated with the climate crisis, property rights, and colonialism.
On the extended entrance ramp, there's a soaring, 26-meter formation of reindeer hides ensnared by power and light cables. It represents a metaphor for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this section of the exhibit, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby dense sheets of ice appear as fluctuating temperatures liquefy and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' main winter sustenance, fungus. Goavvi is a result of climate change, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Polar region than globally.
Previously, I visited Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they carried trailers of food pellets on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to distribute by hand. The herd surrounded round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain attempts for vegetative morsels. This resource-intensive and demanding procedure is having a drastic influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. However the other option is death. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are perishing—some from lack of food, others submerging after sinking in lakes and rivers through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the art is a monument to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.
This artwork also highlights the clear difference between the industrial understanding of electricity as a commodity to be harnessed for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of life force as an inherent power in creatures, people, and land. Tate Modern's history as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as eco-imperialism by Nordic countries. In their efforts to be leaders for renewable energy, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, river barriers, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their legal protections, incomes, and culture are endangered. "It's challenging being such a limited population to defend yourself when the justifications are rooted in environmental protection," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has adopted the rhetoric of sustainability, but yet it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to maintain practices of consumption."
Sara and her kin have themselves clashed with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent regulations on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's brother embarked on a sequence of unsuccessful lawsuits over the forced culling of his livestock, apparently to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a extended series of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi including a huge drape of four hundred cranial remains, which was exhibited at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the lobby.
For numerous Indigenous people, creative work appears the sole sphere in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|
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