🔗 Share this article

Visitors to the renowned gallery are accustomed to unusual displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an artificial sun, slid down helter skelters, and witnessed robotic jellyfish hovering through the air. However this marks the first time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The latest artistic project for this cavernous space—created by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a labyrinthine structure inspired by the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose cavities. Once inside, they can stroll around or relax on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to tribal seniors telling tales and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It might appear playful, but the exhibit pays tribute to a obscure scientific wonder: scientists have discovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the ambient air it inhales by eighty degrees, helping the animal to thrive in harsh Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "creates a sense of insignificance that you as a person are not dominant over nature." The artist is a ex- journalist, young adult author, and rights advocate, who hails from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Possibly that generates the chance to change your viewpoint or spark some modesty," she continues.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The maze-like installation is among various features in Sara's engaging art project honoring the heritage, science, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They have experienced oppression, integration policies, and suppression of their language by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the art also spotlights the community's issues connected to the global warming, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Elements

On the long entrance ramp, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot sculpture of pelts entangled by utility lines. It represents a metaphor for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part spiritual ascent, this section of the artwork, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an harsh environmental condition, in which thick layers of ice form as changing weather melt and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' primary winter nourishment, lichen. The condition is a consequence of planetary warming, which is happening up to four times faster in the Polar region than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and went with Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they carried trailers of animal nutrition on to the barren frozen landscape to provide by hand. The herd gathered round us, scratching the icy ground in futility for vegetative bits. This costly and demanding process is having a significant influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the alternative is death. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are dying—some from hunger, others submerging after plunging into water bodies through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the installation is a monument to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

The sculpture also emphasizes the sharp contrast between the modern understanding of energy as a resource to be harnessed for profit and survival and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an inherent essence in animals, individuals, and land. The gallery's legacy as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi consider eco-imperialism by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be standard bearers for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, river barriers, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their human rights, incomes, and culture are threatened. "It's hard being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the justifications are based on global sustainability," Sara observes. "Extractivism has appropriated the discourse of sustainability, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find better ways to maintain practices of expenditure."

Individual Struggles

The artist and her relatives have themselves conflicted with the state authorities over its tightening regulations on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's brother initiated a set of unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a multi-year series of creations called Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive curtain of four hundred animal bones, which was exhibited at the the show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the public gallery, where it resides in the entrance.

Art as Advocacy

For many Sámi, visual expression appears the sole domain in which they can be understood by outsiders. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|