🔗 Share this article

Visitors to the renowned gallery are accustomed to unusual experiences in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an simulated sun, glided down helter skelters, and seen automated sea creatures floating through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nasal passages of a reindeer. The newest artistic project for this cavernous space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a winding design inspired by the expanded interior of a reindeer's nasal passages. Once inside, they can stroll around or unwind on skins, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors telling narratives and insights.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why choose the nasal structure? It could sound quirky, but the installation honors a rarely recognized natural marvel: experts have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the ambient air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, helping the creature to thrive in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "generates a feeling of smallness that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." Sara is a former reporter, children's author, and land defender, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that fosters the possibility to change your viewpoint or trigger some humility," she states.

An Homage to Indigenous Heritage

The maze-like structure is part of a components in Sara's engaging commission showcasing the traditions, science, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi count about 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They have endured persecution, integration policies, and repression of their tongue by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the work also spotlights the people's issues connected to the climate crisis, loss of territory, and external control.

Symbolism in Materials

Along the lengthy access slope, there's a towering, 26-metre sculpture of pelts trapped by power and light cables. It serves as a analogy for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part heavenly staircase, this section of the artwork, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby thick layers of ice appear as changing weather thaw and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' main cold-season food, lichen. This phenomenon is a consequence of planetary warming, which is taking place up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than in other regions.

Previously, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they transported trailers of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured tundra to provide manually. The herd gathered round us, pawing the frozen ground in vain for vegetative pieces. This resource-intensive and demanding process is having a drastic effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. However the alternative is death. As goavvi winters become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—some from hunger, others drowning after falling into water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the art is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm introducing the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Perspectives

The installation also emphasizes the sharp divergence between the modern view of electricity as a asset to be exploited for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an inherent life force 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 consider environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be standard bearers for clean sources, Nordic nations have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of windfarms, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their human rights, livelihoods, and culture are endangered. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the reasons are rooted in environmental protection," Sara observes. "Extractivism has appropriated the rhetoric of environmentalism, but yet it's just aiming to find alternative ways to persist in patterns of consumption."

Personal Challenges

Sara and her kin have personally conflicted with the state authorities over its increasingly stringent policies on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's brother initiated a set of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the forced culling of his livestock, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara created a four-year collection of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi featuring a colossal drape of numerous cranial remains, which was shown at the the show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it resides in the entryway.

The Role of Art in Activism

Among the community, art seems the exclusive domain in which they can be heard by the global community. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|