🔗 Share this article

Guests to the renowned gallery are used to unusual displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an simulated sun, slid down amusement rides, and observed robotic jellyfish hovering through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nose passages of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this huge space—developed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a winding construction based on the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose cavities. Inside, they can stroll around or relax on skins, listening on headphones to community leaders sharing narratives and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It could seem whimsical, but the installation honors a little-known biological feat: researchers have found that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it inhales by 80 degrees celsius, allowing the animal to survive in harsh Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara notes, "generates a feeling of smallness that you as a individual are not superior over nature." Sara is a ex- reporter, writer for kids, and environmental activist, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Maybe that fosters the potential to alter your outlook or trigger some humbleness," she states.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The winding installation is one of several features in Sara's absorbing art project celebrating the heritage, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They have faced persecution, forced assimilation, and suppression of their dialect by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi belief system and founding narrative, the work also spotlights the community's issues connected to the global warming, property rights, and imperialism.

Meaning in Materials

On the extended entry slope, there's a soaring, 26-meter structure of reindeer hides trapped by power and light cables. It serves as a analogy for the societal frameworks restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this part of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, wherein dense coatings of ice form as fluctuating temperatures thaw and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' main cold-season nourishment, lichen. The condition is a result of global heating, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Far North than in other regions.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and joined Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they hauled carts of animal nutrition on to the exposed Arctic plains to distribute through labor. These animals gathered round us, pawing the icy ground in vain for vegetative morsels. This expensive and demanding process is having a drastic effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. But the other option is starvation. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are dying—some from lack of food, others submerging after plunging into water bodies through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the art is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

This artwork also underscores the clear divergence between the modern view of power as a commodity to be utilized for profit and survival and the Sámi outlook of life force as an inherent life force in creatures, individuals, and nature. The gallery's history as a coal and oil power station is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be leaders for sustainable power, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, water power facilities, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi argue their legal protections, livelihoods, and culture are at risk. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to stand your ground when the justifications are based on saving the world," Sara comments. "Mining practices has adopted the language of ecology, but nonetheless it's just striving to find better ways to persist in habits of consumption."

Family Struggles

Sara and her family have themselves conflicted with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter policies on herding. Previously, Sara's brother initiated a set of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the forced culling of his animals, apparently to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara created a four-year set of creations called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal curtain of numerous cranial remains, which was shown at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the entryway.

Art as Advocacy

Among the community, creative work is the exclusive domain in which they can be heard by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|