🔗 Share this article

Guests to the renowned gallery are accustomed to unusual encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an simulated sun, slid down amusement rides, and witnessed AI-powered jellyfish floating through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the complex nose cavities of a reindeer. The newest artistic project for this immense space—designed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a labyrinthine structure inspired by the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nasal passages. Once inside, they can wander around or relax on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to tribal seniors imparting narratives and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It may appear quirky, but the installation celebrates a little-known natural marvel: scientists have found that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the surrounding air it inhales by eighty degrees, allowing the animal to survive in extreme Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara explains, "generates a feeling of insignificance that you as a person are not superior over nature." The artist is a former reporter, writer for kids, and environmental activist, who is from a reindeer-herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Maybe that fosters the potential to shift your viewpoint or spark some humility," she adds.

An Homage to Indigenous Heritage

The winding structure is part of a elements in Sara's immersive art project showcasing the heritage, science, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi number roughly 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They have faced persecution, cultural suppression, and suppression of their tongue by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the work also highlights the community's struggles associated with the environmental emergency, property rights, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Elements

At the long entry slope, there's a towering, 26-meter sculpture of skins entangled by electrical wires. It can be read as a symbol for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part heavenly staircase, this section of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, wherein dense sheets of ice form as changing weather thaw and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' main winter sustenance, lichen. Goavvi is a result of global heating, which is happening up to four times faster in the Polar region than in other regions.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi reindeer keepers on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they transported carts of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to provide manually. The reindeer crowded round us, digging the icy ground in futility for lichen-covered pieces. This costly and demanding procedure is having a drastic effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. Yet the alternative is starvation. As these icy periods become routine, reindeer are dying—some from lack of food, others suffocating after sinking in streams through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the art is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Perspectives

This artwork also highlights the sharp divergence between the industrial view of power as a commodity to be harnessed for profit and survival and the Sámi outlook of energy as an natural life force in animals, people, and nature. The gallery's past as a fossil fuel plant is connected to this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by Nordic countries. While attempting to be standard bearers for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have clashed with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their legal protections, livelihoods, and traditions are at risk. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the justifications are rooted in global sustainability," Sara observes. "Mining practices has co-opted the language of ecology, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find better ways to continue practices of consumption."

Personal Struggles

Sara and her kin have themselves conflicted with the national administration over its tightening rules on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's sibling undertook a set of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the required reduction of his herd, apparently to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara produced a multi-year series of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive screen of four hundred animal bones, which was exhibited at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the entryway.

The Role of Art in Activism

Among the community, art is the only sphere in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|