🔗 Share this article

Visitors to the renowned gallery are used to surprising displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an artificial sun, descended down helter skelters, and observed robotic jellyfish drifting through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nasal chambers of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this immense space—designed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a labyrinthine structure inspired by the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Upon entering, they can wander around or relax on skins, listening on headphones to community leaders imparting tales and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It may seem playful, but the exhibit celebrates a obscure scientific wonder: researchers have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it inhales by eighty degrees, enabling the creature to endure in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara explains, "produces a perception of inferiority that you as a human being are not in control over nature." Sara is a former reporter, writer for kids, and environmental activist, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that fosters the chance to shift your outlook or evoke some humbleness," she states.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The winding design is among various elements in Sara's absorbing commission honoring the heritage, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They have faced oppression, integration policies, and suppression of their tongue by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the art also spotlights the group's issues associated with the climate crisis, loss of territory, and external control.

Symbolism in Materials

Along the lengthy entrance slope, there's a soaring, 26-metre formation of reindeer hides ensnared by power and light cables. It represents a symbol for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this section of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which dense layers of ice develop as changing weather thaw and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' main winter food, lichen. Goavvi is a result of global heating, which is happening up to four times faster in the Arctic than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a icy season and accompanied Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they carried trailers of animal nutrition on to the barren frozen landscape to distribute through labor. The herd gathered round us, digging the icy ground in vain attempts for vegetative pieces. This resource-intensive and demanding procedure is having a drastic impact on herding practices—and on the animals' natural survival. However the other option is starvation. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are dying—a number from starvation, others drowning after sinking in water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the work is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm introducing the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

The sculpture also highlights the clear difference between the western interpretation of power as a commodity to be exploited for profit and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of life force as an inherent power in creatures, individuals, and the environment. The gallery's past as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be standard bearers for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of windfarms, river barriers, and mines on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and traditions are at risk. "It's very difficult being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the reasons are rooted in global sustainability," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but still it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to maintain patterns of use."

Personal Challenges

Sara and her family have themselves conflicted with the national administration over its increasingly stringent regulations on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's sibling embarked on a series of finally failed lawsuits over the required reduction of his livestock, supposedly to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara developed a four-year collection of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive curtain of 400 cranial remains, which was shown at the 2017 event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Activism

Among the community, art appears the only domain in which they can be understood by outsiders. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|