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Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to unexpected experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an simulated sun, descended down amusement rides, and observed robotic sea creatures floating through the air. However this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nasal cavities of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this huge space—developed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a maze-like structure based on the expanded inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Once inside, they can wander around or chill out on skins, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors sharing tales and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It might seem quirky, but the artwork pays tribute to a little-known scientific wonder: experts have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it breathes in by eighty degrees, allowing the creature to thrive in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara explains, "generates a feeling of inferiority that you as a person are not in control over nature." The artist is a former journalist, young adult author, and rights advocate, who comes from a herding family in northern Norway. "Possibly that creates the chance to shift your perspective or evoke some modesty," she adds.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The winding installation is among various features in Sara's immersive commission honoring the culture, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number roughly 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They have endured discrimination, cultural suppression, and repression of their tongue by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the installation also highlights the people's challenges relating to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Meaning in Elements

On the extended entrance incline, there's a towering, 26-metre sculpture of skins ensnared by power and light cables. It can be read as a analogy for the societal frameworks constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this component of the artwork, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, in which dense coatings of ice develop as changing temperatures melt and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary winter sustenance, fungus. This phenomenon is a consequence of planetary warming, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than globally.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they hauled trailers of food pellets on to the barren frozen landscape to dispense by hand. The reindeer crowded round us, scratching the frozen ground in vain for vegetative bits. This expensive and labour-intensive method is having a significant impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the alternative is malnutrition. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—a number from starvation, others drowning after sinking in water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the art is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Perspectives

The installation also underscores the clear difference between the industrial understanding of energy as a asset to be utilized for profit and existence and the Sámi worldview of energy as an natural life force in animals, humans, and the environment. The gallery's legacy as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be exemplars for renewable energy, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, water power facilities, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and traditions are endangered. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the arguments are grounded in global sustainability," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the discourse of environmentalism, but yet it's just aiming to find better ways to continue practices of consumption."

Individual Challenges

Sara and her relatives have themselves clashed with the state authorities over its tightening policies on herding. Previously, Sara's sibling initiated a series of ultimately unsuccessful court actions over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara produced a multi-year collection of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge drape of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was shown at the the show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it hangs in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work is the sole domain in which they can be understood by outsiders. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|