🔗 Share this article

Visitors to the renowned gallery are familiar to unexpected experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an simulated sun, descended down helter skelters, and seen automated jellyfish drifting through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nasal passages of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this immense space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a maze-like design based on the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nasal airways. Once inside, they can meander around or relax on skins, listening on earphones to tribal seniors sharing narratives and insights.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why the nose? It may appear whimsical, but the exhibit celebrates a rarely recognized natural marvel: scientists have discovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it inhales by 80°C, helping the animal to survive in extreme Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "generates a perception of inferiority that you as a person are not in control over nature." The artist is a ex- journalist, young adult author, and environmental activist, who hails from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that fosters the potential to change your viewpoint or trigger some modesty," she states.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The labyrinthine structure is among various elements in Sara's immersive exhibition celebrating the culture, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They have faced oppression, cultural suppression, and suppression of their language by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the work also draws attention to the group's struggles associated with the climate crisis, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Components

On the extended entry ramp, there's a towering, eighty-five-foot structure of pelts entangled by power and light cables. It can be read as a symbol for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part heavenly staircase, this part of the installation, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein dense sheets of ice develop as varying temperatures melt and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' key cold-season nourishment, moss. Goavvi is a result of planetary warming, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than globally.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in freezing temperatures as they transported containers of food pellets on to the exposed Arctic plains to provide through labor. The herd surrounded round us, digging the slippery ground in vain for vegetative pieces. This expensive and laborious method is having a significant impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. However the other option is malnutrition. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—a number from hunger, others drowning after plunging into lakes and rivers through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the art is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

The installation also emphasizes the stark difference between the modern interpretation of energy as a commodity to be harnessed for profit and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of life force as an inherent life force in animals, humans, and land. This venue's history as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by regional governments. As they strive to be standard bearers for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have clashed with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their human rights, incomes, and way of life are at risk. "It's hard being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the arguments are rooted in saving the world," Sara observes. "Extractivism has co-opted the discourse of ecology, but still it's just attempting to find alternative ways to persist in practices of consumption."

Family Struggles

The artist and her family have personally disagreed with the state authorities over its tightening policies on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's brother undertook a series of finally failed court actions over the required reduction of his animals, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara produced a multi-year series of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal screen of numerous cranial remains, which was displayed at the the show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it hangs in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work appears the sole sphere in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|