🔗 Share this article

Visitors to the renowned gallery are accustomed to surprising experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an artificial sun, glided down spiral slides, and seen robotic sea creatures hovering through the air. Yet this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nose chambers of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this immense space—designed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages patrons into a labyrinthine structure based on the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose passages. Upon entering, they can meander around or chill out on skins, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors imparting narratives and insights.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It could appear whimsical, but the exhibit celebrates a little-known scientific wonder: experts have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it takes in by 80°C, helping the animal to endure in harsh Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara notes, "creates a perception of smallness that you as a person are not superior over nature." The artist is a ex- journalist, young adult author, and environmental activist, who is from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that generates the possibility to change your viewpoint or trigger some humility," she continues.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The maze-like installation is one of several features in Sara's absorbing exhibition showcasing the culture, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They've experienced discrimination, cultural suppression, and repression of their dialect by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi belief system and founding narrative, the installation also highlights the community's struggles relating to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Elements

At the long entrance ramp, there's a looming, 26-metre sculpture of skins entangled by utility lines. It can be read as a metaphor for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Part pylon, part spiritual ascent, this part of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, whereby thick coatings of ice form as varying weather liquefy and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary cold-season food, fungus. This phenomenon is a outcome of climate change, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than in other regions.

A few years back, I visited Sara in a remote town during a icy season and went with Sámi herders on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they hauled carts of supplementary feed on to the barren Arctic plains to distribute by hand. The herd surrounded round us, scratching the icy ground in futility for lichen-covered pieces. This costly and labour-intensive method is having a drastic influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the alternative is malnutrition. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are perishing—some from starvation, others submerging after falling into water bodies through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the installation is a tribute to them. "With the layering of materials, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Perspectives

This artwork also highlights the stark difference between the industrial understanding of power as a commodity to be harnessed for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an innate essence in creatures, people, and the environment. This venue's past as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by Nordic countries. In their efforts to be exemplars for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of windfarms, river barriers, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their legal protections, ways of life, and way of life are threatened. "It's hard being such a limited population to stand your ground when the reasons are rooted in saving the world," Sara notes. "Mining practices has co-opted the discourse of ecology, but still it's just striving to find alternative ways to persist in patterns of expenditure."

Family Conflicts

She and her kin have themselves disagreed with the national administration over its ever-stricter rules on animal husbandry. Previously, Sara's sibling undertook a set of finally failed court actions over the required reduction of his herd, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara produced a extended set of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal curtain of four hundred cranial remains, which was shown at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Awareness

Among the community, creative work is the only realm in which they can be heard by the global community. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|