Visitors to Tate Modern are used to unexpected experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an artificial sun, descended down helter skelters, and seen robotic jellyfish hovering through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be immersing themselves in the detailed nose chambers of a reindeer. The latest artistic project for this cavernous space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a winding design inspired by the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Inside, they can wander around or unwind on skins, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors telling stories and knowledge.
Why choose the nasal structure? It could seem whimsical, but the exhibit celebrates a rarely recognized natural marvel: scientists have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the surrounding air it breathes in by eighty degrees, enabling the animal to endure in harsh Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "creates a sense of smallness that you as a individual are not in control over nature." Sara is a former reporter, young adult author, and rights advocate, who hails from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Possibly that fosters the possibility to change your outlook or trigger some humility," she states.
The winding design is one of several elements in Sara's absorbing exhibition showcasing the heritage, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number about 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They've faced oppression, forced assimilation, and repression of their dialect by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the installation also spotlights the community's struggles connected to the global warming, land dispossession, and colonialism.
At the extended entry incline, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot structure of reindeer hides entangled by utility lines. It represents a analogy for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this section of the exhibit, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein dense layers of ice appear as fluctuating temperatures liquefy and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' main winter sustenance, fungus. This phenomenon is a result of climate change, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Far North than in other regions.
Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and went with Sámi herders on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they carried trailers of food pellets on to the exposed frozen landscape to provide manually. The herd gathered round us, digging the icy ground in vain attempts for lichen-covered morsels. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive process is having a drastic influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. Yet the choice is malnutrition. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are succumbing—some from lack of food, others drowning after falling into streams through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the art is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.
This artwork also underscores the clear divergence between the modern understanding of power as a commodity to be utilized for profit and survival and the Sámi worldview of life force as an natural essence in creatures, individuals, and nature. The gallery's legacy as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be leaders for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the development of windfarms, river barriers, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their human rights, ways of life, and way of life are endangered. "It's hard being such a small minority to protect your rights when the justifications are grounded in global sustainability," Sara comments. "Extractivism has appropriated the discourse of ecology, but still it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to continue practices of consumption."
The artist and her family have themselves conflicted with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter regulations on herding. In 2016, Sara's brother initiated a set of finally failed legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, supposedly to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara developed a multi-year set of creations called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge curtain of four hundred cranial remains, which was displayed at the 2017 event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it hangs in the entryway.
For many Sámi, creative work appears the only domain in which they can be understood by the global community. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|
A passionate textile artist and community organizer who loves inspiring others through creative sewing projects.
