Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to unexpected displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an man-made sun, descended down spiral slides, and seen AI-powered jellyfish drifting through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nose chambers of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this immense space—created by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a maze-like construction modeled after the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nasal airways. Once inside, they can wander around or unwind on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to Sámi elders imparting stories and insights.
What's the focus on the nose? It might sound quirky, but the exhibit pays tribute to a rarely recognized biological feat: experts have found that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the ambient air it breathes in by 80 degrees celsius, helping the animal to thrive in inhospitable Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "generates a perception of insignificance that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." Sara is a ex- reporter, writer for kids, and environmental activist, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that generates the chance to alter your perspective or trigger some humbleness," she continues.
The winding structure is one of several components in Sara's engaging exhibition showcasing the culture, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi count about 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They have endured oppression, forced assimilation, and repression of their dialect by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi mythology and origin tale, the installation also highlights the group's struggles associated with the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and colonialism.
At the lengthy entry incline, there's a looming, 26-metre formation of reindeer hides ensnared by utility lines. It represents a analogy for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Part pylon, part spiritual ascent, this part of the installation, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein solid sheets of ice develop as varying weather melt and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' main cold-season food, fungus. Goavvi is a consequence of global heating, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Arctic than elsewhere.
Three years ago, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi reindeer keepers on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they carried trailers of food pellets on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to dispense manually. The reindeer surrounded round us, digging the slippery ground in vain for vegetative pieces. This expensive and demanding process is having a drastic impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. But the other option is malnutrition. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are dying—some from hunger, others drowning after falling into streams through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the art is a monument to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.
This artwork also underscores the sharp difference between the modern interpretation of power as a asset to be utilized for gain and survival and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an inherent power in creatures, individuals, and nature. Tate Modern's past as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by regional governments. In their efforts to be leaders for renewable energy, these states have locked horns with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and mines on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their human rights, incomes, and way of life are threatened. "It's hard being such a limited population to defend yourself when the reasons are grounded in environmental protection," Sara comments. "Mining practices has appropriated the discourse of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just striving to find better ways to persist in patterns of use."
The artist and her family have personally clashed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent regulations on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's brother undertook a series of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the forced culling of his livestock, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara produced a extended collection of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi including a massive curtain of 400 reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it hangs in the lobby.
Among the community, art appears the sole domain in which they can be listened to by outsiders. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|
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