🔗 Share this article

Guests to the renowned gallery are used to unusual experiences in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an man-made sun, descended down helter skelters, and seen AI-powered jellyfish floating through the air. But this marks the first time they will be immersing themselves in the complex nose chambers of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this huge space—created by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages patrons into a maze-like construction inspired by the expanded inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Inside, they can meander around or chill out on skins, tuning in on headphones to Sámi elders imparting tales and wisdom.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It might appear playful, but the artwork honors a rarely recognized biological feat: researchers have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it inhales by 80°C, enabling the animal to survive in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "generates a sense of smallness that you as a person are not dominant over nature." She is a ex- writer, writer for kids, and environmental activist, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Possibly that creates the chance to shift your perspective or evoke some humility," she adds.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The labyrinthine structure is part of a elements in Sara's absorbing exhibition honoring the culture, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They've endured persecution, integration policies, and suppression of their dialect by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the art also spotlights the group's struggles relating to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Meaning in Components

Along the long entrance ramp, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot sculpture of reindeer hides entangled by power and light cables. It serves as a metaphor for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part heavenly staircase, this part of the artwork, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, wherein solid sheets of ice develop as changing weather liquefy and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' main cold-season sustenance, fungus. This phenomenon is a outcome of planetary warming, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than in other regions.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi herders on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they hauled carts of food pellets on to the barren tundra to dispense through labor. The herd gathered round us, digging the icy ground in vain for lichen-covered morsels. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive process is having a severe effect on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. However the choice is death. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—a number from hunger, others suffocating after falling into streams through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the work is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

The sculpture also highlights the clear contrast between the western understanding of power as a commodity to be exploited for gain and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an innate essence in animals, humans, and land. The gallery's legacy as a fossil fuel plant is linked with this, as is what the Sámi consider environmental exploitation by regional governments. As they strive to be exemplars for clean sources, Nordic nations have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, water power facilities, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their legal protections, incomes, and traditions are at risk. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to stand your ground when the reasons are based on environmental protection," Sara notes. "Extractivism has co-opted the rhetoric of sustainability, but nonetheless it's just striving to find better ways to continue habits of expenditure."

Family Struggles

Sara and her family have themselves conflicted with the national administration over its increasingly stringent regulations on herding. A few years ago, Sara's brother undertook a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the required reduction of his livestock, supposedly to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara produced a multi-year collection of creations named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive drape of 400 animal bones, which was displayed at the 2017 event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it is displayed in the entrance.

Art as Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, art is the sole domain in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|