🔗 Share this article

Attendees to the renowned gallery are familiar to unexpected displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They've basked under an artificial sun, slid down helter skelters, and witnessed robotic sea creatures drifting through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nasal chambers of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a labyrinthine construction inspired by the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nose cavities. Once inside, they can meander around or unwind on reindeer hides, tuning in on headphones to community leaders imparting tales and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why the nose? It may sound whimsical, but the exhibit honors a rarely recognized natural marvel: scientists have found that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the surrounding air it takes in by 80°C, helping the creature to thrive in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara notes, "produces a feeling of inferiority that you as a individual are not in control over nature." She is a ex- writer, children's author, and environmental activist, who hails from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Possibly that generates the chance to change your viewpoint or spark some modesty," she states.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The winding installation is part of a features in Sara's immersive art project honoring the culture, knowledge, and philosophy of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total about 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They've faced discrimination, cultural suppression, and suppression of their tongue by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the installation also highlights the group's struggles associated with the climate crisis, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Materials

At the long entry incline, there's a looming, 26-meter sculpture of reindeer hides ensnared by utility lines. It serves as a symbol for the political and economic systems restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this section of the artwork, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, in which solid sheets of ice develop as fluctuating weather liquefy and ice over the snow, locking in the reindeers' key winter food, lichen. The condition is a result of global heating, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Far North than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they transported containers of food pellets on to the barren frozen landscape to distribute manually. These animals surrounded round us, pawing the icy ground in vain for mossy morsels. This costly and demanding method is having a severe effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. However the alternative is malnutrition. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are succumbing—some from hunger, others drowning after falling into lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the installation is a memorial to them. "With the layering of materials, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

The installation also emphasizes the sharp contrast between the modern interpretation of energy as a resource to be utilized for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of life force as an innate life force in creatures, humans, and the environment. The gallery's history as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider environmental exploitation by regional governments. In their efforts to be standard bearers for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of wind energy projects, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and traditions are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to defend yourself when the arguments are based on global sustainability," Sara comments. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the language of ecology, but yet it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to continue habits of use."

Individual Struggles

She and her kin have personally disagreed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent policies on animal husbandry. Previously, Sara's brother embarked on a series of finally failed lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, apparently to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara produced a four-year series of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge screen of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the the event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the lobby.

Creative Expression as Activism

Among the community, creative work is the only domain in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|