Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an man-made sun, descended down amusement rides, and observed robotic jellyfish drifting through the air. However this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nose passages of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this huge space—developed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a winding structure inspired by the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Once inside, they can meander around or chill out on skins, tuning in on earphones to tribal seniors sharing stories and knowledge.
Why the nose? It may appear playful, but the installation pays tribute to a rarely recognized biological feat: researchers have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, helping the creature to thrive in harsh Arctic conditions. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "generates a perception of inferiority that you as a human being are not superior over nature." Sara is a ex- journalist, young adult author, and rights advocate, who hails from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that creates the potential to shift your perspective or spark some humility," she continues.
The winding installation is among various features in Sara's absorbing commission honoring the culture, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number roughly 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They have experienced oppression, forced assimilation, and eradication of their language by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the work also highlights the people's challenges associated with the global warming, loss of territory, and external control.
On the long access slope, there's a soaring, 26-meter formation of skins entangled by electrical wires. It represents a analogy for the societal frameworks restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this component of the exhibit, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, in which dense layers of ice appear as varying weather thaw and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' key cold-season sustenance, moss. The condition is a outcome of planetary warming, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than globally.
A few years back, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi reindeer keepers on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they hauled carts of supplementary feed on to the exposed Arctic plains to distribute by hand. These animals crowded round us, digging the slippery ground in vain attempts for lichen-covered morsels. This costly and demanding method is having a severe influence on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the alternative is starvation. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are dying—some from hunger, others drowning after falling into streams through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the work is a memorial to them. "With the layering of elements, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.
This artwork also emphasizes the clear difference between the western understanding of electricity as a resource to be exploited for gain and survival and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an inherent essence in animals, individuals, and nature. Tate Modern's past 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 exemplars for renewable energy, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of windfarms, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and culture are threatened. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to defend yourself when the reasons are grounded in global sustainability," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the language of ecology, but yet it's just attempting to find alternative ways to continue patterns of expenditure."
Sara and her family have themselves conflicted with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter regulations on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's brother undertook a set of unsuccessful legal cases over the required reduction of his livestock, apparently to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a extended series of creations called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge drape of numerous reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the the show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it hangs in the lobby.
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