Guests to Tate Modern are familiar to unexpected encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an man-made sun, descended down helter skelters, and seen automated jellyfish drifting through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nose passages of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this immense space—designed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a maze-like structure modeled after the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Inside, they can stroll around or unwind on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to community leaders telling narratives and insights.
Why choose the nasal structure? It may appear playful, but the artwork pays tribute to a rarely recognized biological feat: researchers have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, helping the animal to endure in harsh Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "produces a perception of insignificance that you as a person are not dominant over nature." The artist is a ex- reporter, children's author, and rights advocate, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that generates the chance to alter your outlook or trigger some modesty," she adds.
The maze-like installation is one of several elements in Sara's immersive commission celebrating the traditions, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They have faced persecution, forced assimilation, and eradication of their tongue by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the art also spotlights the people's issues relating to the environmental emergency, property rights, and imperialism.
Along the long access incline, there's a soaring, 26-metre structure of skins ensnared by power and light cables. It serves as a symbol for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Part pylon, part heavenly staircase, this part of the artwork, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, in which dense layers of ice appear as fluctuating weather liquefy and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' key cold-season sustenance, lichen. The condition is a outcome of planetary warming, which is happening up to four times faster in the Polar region than globally.
Three years ago, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they hauled trailers of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to provide through labor. These animals gathered round us, digging the frozen ground in futility for lichen-covered morsels. This expensive and demanding procedure is having a significant impact on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. However the alternative is death. As goavvi winters become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—some from lack of food, others drowning after falling into streams through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the work is a monument to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.
The installation also emphasizes the sharp divergence between the modern interpretation of energy as a commodity to be utilized for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an natural life force in creatures, people, and nature. Tate Modern's past as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by Nordic countries. In their efforts to be standard bearers for renewable energy, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi assert their legal protections, ways of life, and traditions are threatened. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to stand your ground when the reasons are rooted in saving the world," Sara notes. "Extractivism has co-opted the discourse of environmentalism, but yet it's just aiming to find alternative ways to persist in habits of expenditure."
Sara and her kin have personally clashed with the state authorities over its ever-stricter regulations on herding. Previously, Sara's sibling initiated a series of unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara developed a four-year series of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive screen of four hundred animal bones, which was shown at the the show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the public gallery, where it is displayed in the entryway.
For numerous Indigenous people, visual expression is the only realm in which they can be understood by the global community. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|
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