🔗 Share this article

Guests to the renowned gallery are used to unexpected displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They've basked under an artificial sun, glided down amusement rides, and observed AI-powered jellyfish hovering through the air. But this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nasal chambers of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this cavernous space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a labyrinthine construction based on the expanded inside of a reindeer's nasal passages. Inside, they can meander around or unwind on skins, tuning in on earphones to community leaders telling tales and insights.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It could appear whimsical, but the exhibit celebrates a rarely recognized natural marvel: experts have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the surrounding air it takes in by eighty degrees, helping the creature to survive in extreme Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "generates a perception of smallness that you as a individual are not superior over nature." Sara is a ex- reporter, young adult author, and land defender, who is from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that creates the potential to change your viewpoint or evoke some humility," she continues.

An Homage to Indigenous Heritage

The maze-like structure is among various elements in Sara's immersive exhibition celebrating the heritage, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They have endured persecution, forced assimilation, and suppression of their tongue by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the art also draws attention to the group's challenges connected to the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and external control.

Meaning in Components

On the extended access incline, there's a soaring, 26-metre formation of pelts entangled by electrical wires. It can be read as a analogy for the societal frameworks constraining the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this component of the installation, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which solid coatings of ice develop as fluctuating weather melt and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary winter nourishment, fungus. Goavvi is a result of climate change, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Far North than in other regions.

A few years back, I met with Sara in a remote town during a icy season and joined Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they carried containers of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to provide manually. The reindeer surrounded round us, digging the slippery ground in vain for mossy bits. This expensive and labour-intensive method is having a drastic influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the alternative is starvation. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—a number from lack of food, others suffocating after falling into water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. In a sense, the work is a memorial to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

The sculpture also highlights the sharp divergence between the industrial interpretation of energy as a asset to be harnessed for profit and survival and the Sámi worldview of energy as an natural essence in creatures, humans, and land. The gallery's history as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be standard bearers for clean sources, these states have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, water power facilities, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi assert their human rights, incomes, and culture are at risk. "It's challenging being such a limited population to stand your ground when the reasons are rooted in saving the world," Sara comments. "Extractivism has co-opted the rhetoric of sustainability, but yet it's just striving to find more suitable ways to continue habits of consumption."

Family Conflicts

The artist and her family have themselves disagreed with the national administration over its tightening regulations on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's sibling initiated a sequence of unsuccessful court actions over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara created a multi-year series of creations named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge screen of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it resides in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Awareness

Among the community, art seems the exclusive realm in which they can be heard by outsiders. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|