🔗 Share this article

Visitors to the renowned gallery are accustomed to unusual displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've basked under an artificial sun, slid down helter skelters, and seen automated sea creatures drifting through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this immense space—developed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a winding construction modeled after the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose cavities. Upon entering, they can stroll around or relax on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to Sámi elders imparting narratives and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It may seem whimsical, but the artwork celebrates a obscure natural marvel: experts have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it inhales by 80°C, allowing the animal to endure in extreme Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "generates a perception of insignificance that you as a human being are not in control over nature." She is a former journalist, young adult author, and land defender, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that fosters the potential to alter your viewpoint or spark some humbleness," she adds.

A Celebration to Indigenous Heritage

The maze-like installation is one of several elements in Sara's immersive exhibition celebrating the culture, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi number about 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They have endured persecution, integration policies, and eradication of their dialect by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the work also highlights the group's issues relating to the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Components

Along the long entrance slope, there's a soaring, 26-meter formation of skins entangled by power and light cables. It can be read as a metaphor for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this part of the installation, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby thick coatings of ice form as varying temperatures liquefy and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' key winter nourishment, lichen. Goavvi is a result of climate change, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Arctic than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they hauled carts of food pellets on to the barren frozen landscape to distribute through labor. The herd crowded round us, digging the slippery ground in vain for lichen-covered morsels. This expensive and labour-intensive process is having a severe influence on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the other option is starvation. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are dying—a number from lack of food, others suffocating after falling into water bodies through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the work is a tribute to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

The installation also underscores the clear contrast between the industrial understanding of energy as a asset to be exploited for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of energy as an inherent power in creatures, people, and nature. This venue's history as a coal and oil power station is connected to this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by Nordic countries. As they strive to be exemplars for sustainable power, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and way of life are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the arguments are based on global sustainability," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the language of environmentalism, but still it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to persist in practices of consumption."

Personal Conflicts

The artist and her family have personally disagreed with the state authorities over its tightening regulations on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's sibling undertook a sequence of unsuccessful legal cases over the required reduction of his herd, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara created a multi-year collection of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi including a huge drape of 400 cranial remains, which was exhibited at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the national institution, where it hangs in the entrance.

Art as Activism

For many Sámi, creative work seems the exclusive realm in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|