Guests to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an artificial sun, descended down spiral slides, and observed AI-powered sea creatures hovering through the air. However this marks the first time they will be immersing themselves in the detailed nasal chambers of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this cavernous space—developed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a winding construction modeled after the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Inside, they can stroll around or chill out on skins, tuning in on earphones to community leaders imparting stories and insights.
Focus on the Nasal Passages
Why the nose? It might appear playful, but the artwork honors a little-known biological feat: experts have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it inhales by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the animal to thrive in harsh Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "produces a sense of smallness that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." She is a former reporter, children's author, and environmental activist, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Maybe that creates the potential to change your perspective or trigger some humility," she adds.
A Tribute to Sámi Culture
The winding design is among various components in Sara's immersive art project celebrating the traditions, knowledge, and philosophy of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They have experienced oppression, forced assimilation, and repression of their language by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the installation also highlights the community's struggles relating to the global warming, loss of territory, and external control.
Symbolism in Materials
On the extended entry incline, there's a towering, 26-meter structure of reindeer hides entangled by electrical wires. It represents a symbol for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this part of the installation, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, wherein solid sheets of ice develop as changing temperatures melt and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' main cold-season sustenance, fungus. This phenomenon is a result of climate change, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than elsewhere.
A few years back, I met with Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and joined Sámi reindeer keepers on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they carried trailers of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to provide by hand. These animals crowded round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain for mossy pieces. This costly and labour-intensive process is having a drastic influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the alternative is malnutrition. As these icy periods become routine, reindeer are dying—a number from hunger, others drowning after sinking in streams through unstable frozen surfaces. In a sense, the work is a memorial to them. "With the layering of elements, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.
Opposing Worldviews
The installation also highlights the stark difference between the western interpretation of electricity as a resource to be harnessed for profit and survival and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an innate power in animals, humans, and the environment. Tate Modern's legacy as a coal and oil power station is connected to this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by regional governments. As they strive to be leaders for renewable energy, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the building of windfarms, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi assert their legal protections, ways of life, and way of life are at risk. "It's hard being such a tiny group to stand your ground when the reasons are based on global sustainability," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but yet it's just attempting to find better ways to maintain habits of expenditure."
Personal Conflicts
She and her kin have themselves clashed with the Norwegian government over its tightening regulations on herding. A few years ago, Sara's sibling initiated a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the required reduction of his herd, apparently to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara developed a multi-year set of creations called Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge screen of four hundred animal bones, which was exhibited at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the entryway.
Creative Expression as Awareness
For many Sámi, visual expression appears the sole domain in which they can be listened to by the global community. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|
