🔗 Share this article

Visitors to the renowned gallery are used to unexpected encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an artificial sun, descended down spiral slides, and seen automated jellyfish drifting through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nose cavities of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this cavernous space—created by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a labyrinthine design based on the expanded inside of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Once inside, they can stroll around or unwind on reindeer hides, tuning in on headphones to community leaders telling stories and insights.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It might sound whimsical, but the exhibit honors a little-known biological feat: researchers have found that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it inhales by eighty degrees, allowing the creature to survive in harsh Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "produces a feeling of insignificance that you as a human being are not superior over nature." She is a former writer, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who comes from a pastoral family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that creates the possibility to shift your viewpoint or evoke some humility," she states.

A Tribute to Traditional Ways

The labyrinthine structure is one of several features in Sara's absorbing exhibition celebrating the culture, science, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They've endured discrimination, integration policies, and repression of their language by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the art also spotlights the community's struggles connected to the global warming, loss of territory, and colonialism.

Meaning in Materials

On the extended entrance slope, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot sculpture of reindeer hides entangled by power and light cables. It serves as a symbol for the political and economic systems restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this component of the artwork, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, in which dense coatings of ice form as changing weather liquefy and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' main winter sustenance, fungus. The condition is a result of planetary warming, which is taking place up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I met with Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they transported trailers of animal nutrition on to the barren Arctic plains to distribute through labor. The herd crowded round us, scratching the frozen ground in futility for vegetative morsels. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive process is having a drastic impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. However the choice is death. As these icy periods become frequent, reindeer are dying—a number from hunger, others drowning after sinking in lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the art is a memorial to them. "With the layering of materials, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Perspectives

The installation also highlights the stark divergence between the industrial interpretation of energy as a commodity to be harnessed for gain and survival and the Sámi worldview of life force as an innate power in animals, humans, and land. This venue's history as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as eco-imperialism by regional governments. While attempting to be standard bearers for sustainable power, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, river barriers, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and culture are threatened. "It's challenging being such a limited population to stand your ground when the reasons are grounded in global sustainability," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has adopted the discourse of ecology, but still it's just striving to find more suitable ways to continue practices of expenditure."

Family Challenges

She and her relatives have personally disagreed with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter policies on herding. Previously, Sara's sibling undertook a series of finally failed legal cases over the forced culling of his herd, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara developed a extended series of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive curtain of 400 cranial remains, which was displayed at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it is displayed in the lobby.

The Role of Art in Awareness

For many Sámi, creative work seems the sole realm in which they can be listened to by outsiders. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|