Attendees to the renowned gallery are used to surprising encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They have basked under an man-made sun, slid down helter skelters, and seen automated sea creatures hovering through the air. Yet this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the complex nose passages of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this huge space—developed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a labyrinthine design based on the expanded inside of a reindeer's nose cavities. Once inside, they can wander around or relax on reindeer hides, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors telling tales and wisdom.
Why choose the nasal structure? It may sound whimsical, but the installation celebrates a little-known scientific wonder: experts have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it breathes in by 80°C, enabling the animal to endure in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "produces a feeling of smallness that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." She is a former reporter, children's author, and environmental activist, who comes from a herding family in northern Norway. "Possibly that creates the chance to alter your viewpoint or evoke some modesty," she adds.
The maze-like structure is one of several elements in Sara's immersive art project celebrating the heritage, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They have faced discrimination, cultural suppression, and suppression of their dialect by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the art also highlights the community's struggles associated with the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and external control.
On the lengthy entry incline, there's a soaring, 26-meter sculpture of pelts entangled by power and light cables. It can be read as a metaphor for the societal frameworks constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part heavenly staircase, this section of the exhibit, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an harsh environmental condition, wherein solid coatings of ice appear as varying weather thaw and ice over the snow, locking in the reindeers' primary winter sustenance, moss. The condition is a outcome of climate change, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than in other regions.
A few years back, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and went with Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in freezing temperatures as they carried carts of food pellets on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to provide manually. The herd crowded round us, scratching the frozen ground in futility for vegetative morsels. This costly and demanding procedure is having a drastic impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. But the alternative is starvation. As these icy periods become routine, reindeer are perishing—some from hunger, others suffocating after sinking in lakes and rivers through prematurely melting ice. To some extent, the art is a monument to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.
This artwork also underscores the clear difference between the industrial view of power as a resource to be exploited for gain and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an innate power in animals, individuals, and land. The gallery's history as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by regional governments. As they strive to be exemplars for sustainable power, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, river barriers, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi contend their human rights, livelihoods, and way of life are at risk. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to protect your rights when the justifications are grounded in saving the world," Sara comments. "Resource exploitation has adopted the rhetoric of ecology, but yet it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to maintain habits of consumption."
Sara and her family have themselves disagreed with the national administration over its tightening regulations on animal husbandry. Previously, Sara's sibling embarked on a series of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a multi-year collection of creations named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive screen of numerous animal bones, which was shown at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the entrance.
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