🔗 Share this article

Guests to the renowned gallery are used to unexpected encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an artificial sun, slid down helter skelters, and seen AI-powered sea creatures drifting through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nasal chambers of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this immense space—designed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes patrons into a maze-like structure based on the expanded interior of a reindeer's nasal airways. Once inside, they can stroll around or relax on skins, listening on headphones to Sámi elders imparting tales and wisdom.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It might seem quirky, but the exhibit honors a obscure biological feat: scientists have found that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the ambient air it breathes in by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the animal to thrive in inhospitable Arctic climates. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "creates a perception of insignificance that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." She is a ex- journalist, children's author, and rights advocate, who is from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Maybe that creates the possibility to alter your viewpoint or trigger some humility," she adds.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The labyrinthine installation is one of several features in Sara's engaging art project showcasing the culture, science, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number roughly 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They've endured discrimination, forced assimilation, and eradication of their tongue by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the art also spotlights the community's struggles connected to the climate crisis, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Elements

On the lengthy entrance slope, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot sculpture of skins trapped by electrical wires. It serves as a analogy for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this section of the artwork, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby solid sheets of ice form as varying weather liquefy and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' main winter nourishment, moss. Goavvi is a consequence of planetary warming, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I met with Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they transported containers of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured tundra to provide by hand. The herd crowded round us, digging the slippery ground in futility for vegetative pieces. This expensive and labour-intensive process is having a significant influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. Yet the alternative is starvation. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are perishing—some from lack of food, others suffocating after falling into streams through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the installation is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

This artwork also emphasizes the stark difference between the western interpretation of energy as a asset to be utilized for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an innate essence in animals, humans, and nature. The gallery's past as a coal and oil power station is connected to this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by Nordic countries. In their efforts to be exemplars for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, water power facilities, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and way of life are threatened. "It's hard being such a limited population to stand your ground when the reasons are based on environmental protection," Sara observes. "Extractivism has appropriated the language of ecology, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find better ways to maintain patterns of expenditure."

Personal Challenges

The artist and her family have personally conflicted with the national administration over its tightening policies on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's brother undertook a set of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the required reduction of his herd, apparently to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara developed a extended set of creations named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge curtain of numerous reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the entryway.

The Role of Art in Awareness

For many Sámi, art appears the sole domain in which they can be heard by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|