🔗 Share this article

Visitors to the renowned gallery are used to unexpected experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an artificial sun, glided down helter skelters, and seen automated sea creatures drifting through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the detailed nasal passages of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes patrons into a maze-like design inspired by the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nose cavities. Once inside, they can wander around or chill out on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to tribal seniors sharing narratives and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It could sound playful, but the installation celebrates a obscure natural marvel: researchers have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it inhales by 80 degrees celsius, allowing the creature to endure in extreme Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "creates a feeling of inferiority that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." She is a former writer, writer for kids, and environmental activist, who hails from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that generates the potential to change your viewpoint or evoke some humility," she adds.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The maze-like structure is one of several components in Sara's immersive commission celebrating the traditions, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They have experienced persecution, forced assimilation, and repression of their language by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the work also draws attention to the group's challenges associated with the global warming, property rights, and external control.

Metaphor in Materials

At the extended entrance incline, there's a towering, 26-meter structure of pelts ensnared by utility lines. It serves as a metaphor for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this section of the installation, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an harsh environmental condition, in which dense coatings of ice develop as varying conditions thaw and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' key winter sustenance, lichen. This phenomenon is a consequence of global heating, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Far North than in other regions.

A few years back, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they transported containers of supplementary feed on to the barren tundra to dispense manually. The herd gathered round us, digging the slippery ground in vain for mossy bits. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive method is having a severe effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. However the choice is malnutrition. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are dying—some from starvation, others suffocating after sinking in lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the installation is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Perspectives

The sculpture also highlights the stark divergence between the industrial interpretation of power as a resource to be exploited for profit and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of life force as an innate essence in animals, people, and nature. This venue's past as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by regional governments. In their efforts to be leaders for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their legal protections, ways of life, and traditions are threatened. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to protect your rights when the justifications are grounded in saving the world," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the language of ecology, but yet it's just attempting to find better ways to maintain habits of consumption."

Family Struggles

She and her kin have themselves conflicted with the national administration over its increasingly stringent rules on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's brother undertook a sequence of finally failed lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a four-year series of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi including a huge drape of four hundred animal bones, which was shown at the the show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For many Sámi, art is the exclusive realm in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|