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Attendees to Tate Modern are accustomed to unusual encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've basked under an artificial sun, slid down spiral slides, and observed AI-powered sea creatures drifting through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nose chambers of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this huge space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages patrons into a maze-like design based on the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Inside, they can wander around or relax on pelts, listening on headphones to Sámi elders telling tales and knowledge.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It could seem playful, but the exhibit pays tribute to a obscure biological feat: researchers have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it takes in by eighty degrees, allowing the creature to endure in inhospitable Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "creates a sense of smallness that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." Sara is a former journalist, writer for kids, and land defender, who hails from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that fosters the chance to shift your outlook or evoke some humility," she continues.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The maze-like structure is part of a components in Sara's absorbing commission honoring the traditions, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They have faced oppression, cultural suppression, and eradication of their tongue by all four states. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the installation also highlights the community's issues connected to the climate crisis, loss of territory, and colonialism.

Meaning in Elements

On the lengthy access incline, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot structure of reindeer hides trapped by electrical wires. It serves as a symbol for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this section of the installation, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, whereby dense layers of ice develop as varying temperatures thaw and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' key winter food, lichen. The condition is a consequence of climate change, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Polar region than globally.

A few years back, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi herders on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they hauled trailers of food pellets on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to dispense by hand. The herd gathered round us, digging the icy ground in vain for vegetative pieces. This costly and labour-intensive method is having a severe influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. But the choice is starvation. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are dying—a number from starvation, others submerging after sinking in lakes and rivers through prematurely melting ice. To some extent, the work is a tribute to them. "With the layering of materials, in a way I'm introducing the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

This artwork also emphasizes the sharp contrast between the industrial view of electricity as a commodity to be utilized for profit and existence and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an innate life force in animals, humans, and land. Tate Modern's past as a fossil fuel plant is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as eco-imperialism by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be standard bearers for sustainable power, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the building of windfarms, river barriers, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi assert their human rights, livelihoods, and culture are at risk. "It's very difficult being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the justifications are rooted in saving the world," Sara observes. "Extractivism has appropriated the rhetoric of ecology, but yet it's just striving to find more suitable ways to maintain practices of expenditure."

Individual Struggles

The artist and her kin have themselves conflicted with the national administration over its tightening regulations on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's brother undertook a set of unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, supposedly to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara produced a multi-year set of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a colossal screen of 400 cranial remains, which was displayed at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it hangs in the lobby.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For many Sámi, creative work appears the exclusive sphere in which they can be heard by people of other nations. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|