🔗 Share this article

Attendees to the renowned gallery are used to unusual displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an simulated sun, glided down amusement rides, and observed AI-powered jellyfish hovering through the air. Yet this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nose passages of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this cavernous space—developed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a winding structure modeled after the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Upon entering, they can wander around or chill out on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to tribal seniors sharing stories and insights.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It might seem playful, but the artwork celebrates a little-known scientific wonder: experts have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the surrounding air it takes in by 80°C, enabling the creature to endure in harsh Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara explains, "creates a feeling of inferiority that you as a human being are not superior over nature." Sara is a former reporter, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who is from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Maybe that creates the potential to alter your perspective or trigger some humility," she continues.

A Tribute to Traditional Ways

The winding installation is part of a elements in Sara's engaging exhibition honoring the culture, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They've endured discrimination, integration policies, and suppression of their language by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the art also highlights the people's challenges connected to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Elements

Along the lengthy entry incline, there's a looming, 26-metre sculpture of pelts ensnared by power and light cables. It serves as a metaphor for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Part pylon, part spiritual ascent, this part of the installation, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, whereby dense coatings of ice develop as varying weather liquefy and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary winter food, fungus. This phenomenon is a outcome of global heating, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Far North than elsewhere.

A few years back, I visited Sara in a remote town during a icy season and went with Sámi herders on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they hauled containers of supplementary feed on to the barren frozen landscape to provide by hand. These animals gathered round us, scratching the frozen ground in futility for mossy pieces. This resource-intensive and laborious process is having a significant impact on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the other option is death. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—a number from lack of food, others suffocating after sinking in streams through prematurely melting ice. To some extent, the work is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

The installation also underscores the stark contrast between the modern understanding of electricity as a resource to be utilized for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of life force as an natural essence in creatures, individuals, and the environment. This venue's history as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by Nordic countries. As they strive to be standard bearers for clean sources, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of windfarms, river barriers, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi contend their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and traditions are threatened. "It's hard being such a small minority to protect your rights when the reasons are based on environmental protection," Sara comments. "Extractivism has adopted the discourse of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find alternative ways to continue habits of use."

Family Conflicts

Sara and her kin have personally conflicted with the state authorities over its ever-stricter policies on animal husbandry. Previously, Sara's sibling embarked on a sequence of unsuccessful court actions over the required reduction of his livestock, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a multi-year collection of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal screen of numerous reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the 2017's art exhibition Documenta 14 and later purchased by the public gallery, where it hangs in the lobby.

Creative Expression as Activism

Among the community, visual expression appears the exclusive sphere in which they can be heard by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|