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Guests to Tate Modern are accustomed to unexpected displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have basked under an artificial sun, glided down spiral slides, and witnessed robotic sea creatures drifting through the air. Yet this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the detailed nose chambers of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this immense space—created by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a maze-like construction inspired by the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Inside, they can meander around or relax on pelts, listening on earphones to Sámi elders telling narratives and insights.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It might appear whimsical, but the artwork honors a obscure scientific wonder: researchers have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it breathes in by 80 degrees celsius, helping the animal to thrive in extreme Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "produces a feeling of insignificance that you as a individual are not in control over nature." Sara is a former writer, writer for kids, and land defender, who hails from a pastoral family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that fosters the chance to alter your viewpoint or spark some humility," she continues.

An Homage to Indigenous Heritage

The maze-like design is among various elements in Sara's immersive art project honoring the culture, understanding, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They've faced persecution, integration policies, and repression of their tongue by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi mythology and origin tale, the installation also spotlights the community's struggles relating to the environmental emergency, property rights, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Elements

Along the extended access ramp, there's a soaring, 26-meter structure of reindeer hides ensnared by power and light cables. It can be read as a analogy for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this component of the exhibit, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby solid sheets of ice develop as varying conditions thaw and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' main cold-season food, lichen. Goavvi is a consequence of global heating, which is taking place up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than globally.

A few years back, I visited Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and went with Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they transported containers of supplementary feed on to the barren tundra to provide by hand. The herd gathered round us, scratching the frozen ground in futility for lichen-covered morsels. This costly and demanding process is having a drastic impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. But the other option is death. As goavvi winters become frequent, reindeer are dying—a number from hunger, others suffocating after falling into streams through unstable frozen surfaces. In a sense, the art is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

The sculpture also emphasizes the sharp contrast between the industrial interpretation of electricity as a commodity to be harnessed for profit and existence and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an inherent essence in animals, humans, and the environment. This venue's legacy as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by Nordic countries. In their efforts to be leaders for clean sources, Nordic nations have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of windfarms, river barriers, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their human rights, ways of life, and way of life are threatened. "It's challenging being such a limited population to stand your ground when the reasons are grounded in environmental protection," Sara notes. "Extractivism has appropriated the rhetoric of environmentalism, but still it's just aiming to find alternative ways to persist in practices of consumption."

Individual Challenges

She and her relatives have themselves clashed with the national administration over its tightening rules on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's sibling embarked on a sequence of finally failed legal cases over the forced culling of his herd, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara produced a extended set of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a colossal screen of numerous reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the the show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the entryway.

Art as Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, visual expression appears the exclusive realm in which they can be listened to by outsiders. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|