🔗 Share this article

Attendees to the renowned gallery are accustomed to surprising encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an artificial sun, slid down helter skelters, and observed automated sea creatures hovering through the air. But this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this huge space—developed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages patrons into a maze-like construction inspired by the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Inside, they can wander around or relax on pelts, listening on earphones to community leaders sharing narratives and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It could sound quirky, but the artwork honors a little-known scientific wonder: researchers have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it inhales by 80°C, helping the creature to thrive in harsh Arctic conditions. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "generates a feeling of smallness that you as a individual are not in control over nature." Sara is a former journalist, children's author, and rights advocate, who comes from a pastoral family in northern Norway. "Maybe that creates the chance to shift your viewpoint or trigger some humbleness," she continues.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The labyrinthine structure is among various components in Sara's immersive exhibition showcasing the traditions, knowledge, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They've endured oppression, forced assimilation, and suppression of their tongue by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the work also draws attention to the community's issues connected to the global warming, property rights, and imperialism.

Meaning in Materials

On the extended access incline, there's a soaring, 26-metre formation of pelts ensnared by electrical wires. It can be read as a symbol for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this component of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, in which thick sheets of ice develop as varying temperatures melt and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary cold-season food, fungus. The condition is a result of global heating, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than in other regions.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and joined Sámi herders on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they hauled trailers of food pellets on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to distribute by hand. The reindeer surrounded round us, scratching the slippery ground in vain for mossy pieces. This resource-intensive and laborious procedure is having a drastic influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. But the other option is death. As goavvi winters become frequent, reindeer are perishing—a number from starvation, others submerging after falling into streams through prematurely melting ice. To some extent, the installation is a monument to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Perspectives

The sculpture also highlights the sharp contrast between the western understanding of electricity as a asset to be utilized for gain and existence and the Sámi outlook of life force as an innate essence in animals, people, and the environment. The gallery's history as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by regional governments. In their efforts to be leaders for renewable energy, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi assert their legal protections, ways of life, and culture are at risk. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to protect your rights when the reasons are grounded in environmental protection," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the rhetoric of ecology, but still it's just aiming to find better ways to maintain habits of expenditure."

Family Challenges

She and her kin have personally conflicted with the national administration over its increasingly stringent policies on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's sibling initiated a series of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the forced culling of his herd, supposedly to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara produced a extended set of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal drape of 400 animal bones, which was exhibited at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it is displayed in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work seems the exclusive sphere in which they can be heard by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|