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Guests to Tate Modern are accustomed to unusual displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've basked under an man-made sun, slid down helter skelters, and witnessed AI-powered jellyfish hovering through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be immersing themselves in the complex nasal passages of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this cavernous space—developed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a maze-like design inspired by the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nasal airways. Inside, they can wander around or chill out on skins, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors imparting narratives and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It may sound whimsical, but the installation pays tribute to a little-known natural marvel: researchers have discovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it breathes in by 80 degrees celsius, allowing the animal to endure in harsh Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "creates a feeling of smallness that you as a human being are not in control over nature." Sara is a former journalist, young adult author, and land defender, who is from a pastoral family in northern Norway. "Possibly that fosters the potential to change your viewpoint or evoke some modesty," she adds.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The labyrinthine design is among various elements in Sara's engaging commission showcasing the culture, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They've experienced persecution, integration policies, and repression of their language by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the installation also spotlights the group's issues relating to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and external control.

Symbolism in Elements

Along the lengthy access incline, there's a soaring, 26-meter sculpture of skins ensnared by power and light cables. It serves as a analogy for the societal frameworks restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this part of the artwork, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, wherein solid sheets of ice form as varying temperatures liquefy and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary winter nourishment, lichen. This phenomenon is a outcome of climate change, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Arctic than elsewhere.

A few years back, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi herders on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they hauled trailers of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to distribute by hand. The reindeer gathered round us, pawing the frozen ground in futility for mossy pieces. This costly and laborious method is having a significant impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. However the choice is starvation. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are succumbing—a number from lack of food, others drowning after plunging into lakes and rivers through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the work is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Perspectives

This artwork also emphasizes the clear divergence between the industrial understanding of power as a commodity to be utilized for profit and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an natural power in creatures, people, and nature. The gallery's past as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by Nordic countries. While attempting to be exemplars for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have clashed with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their human rights, ways of life, and traditions are endangered. "It's hard being such a small minority to defend yourself when the reasons are rooted in saving the world," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the discourse of environmentalism, but still it's just striving to find alternative ways to persist in habits of use."

Personal Challenges

She and her relatives have themselves conflicted with the state authorities over its increasingly stringent policies on herding. In 2016, Sara's sibling undertook a set of unsuccessful court actions over the required reduction of his herd, apparently to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara developed a four-year series of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi including a huge drape of numerous cranial remains, which was shown at the the event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it resides in the entrance.

Art as Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work is the sole realm in which they can be listened to by outsiders. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|