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Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an artificial sun, slid down spiral slides, and observed AI-powered sea creatures hovering through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nose cavities of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this immense space—created by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages patrons into a winding structure modeled after the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nose passages. Inside, they can stroll around or relax on skins, listening on headphones to tribal seniors sharing stories and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It may appear whimsical, but the exhibit celebrates a obscure natural marvel: researchers have discovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the surrounding air it inhales by eighty degrees, helping the creature to endure in harsh Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "generates a perception of inferiority that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." The artist is a ex- reporter, young adult author, and environmental activist, who comes from a pastoral family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that generates the chance to alter your perspective or trigger some humbleness," she continues.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The maze-like structure is one of several elements in Sara's absorbing exhibition honoring the culture, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They've faced persecution, integration policies, and eradication of their tongue by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the installation also highlights the group's challenges associated with the climate crisis, property rights, and external control.

Meaning in Materials

Along the extended access slope, there's a looming, 26-metre sculpture of skins trapped by power and light cables. It can be read as a symbol for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this part of the installation, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein dense sheets of ice form as fluctuating weather thaw and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' main winter food, fungus. The condition is a consequence of climate change, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi herders on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they hauled carts of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to distribute manually. The herd surrounded round us, digging the frozen ground in futility for mossy morsels. This costly and laborious procedure is having a drastic impact on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. However the other option is malnutrition. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are dying—a number from hunger, others drowning after plunging into streams through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the installation is a monument to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

This artwork also emphasizes the sharp divergence between the modern interpretation of electricity as a asset to be harnessed for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of life force as an innate power in creatures, individuals, and land. This venue's past as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by Nordic countries. As they strive to be leaders for renewable energy, Nordic nations have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of windfarms, river barriers, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi contend their legal protections, ways of life, and way of life are threatened. "It's challenging being such a limited population to stand your ground when the justifications are grounded in environmental protection," Sara observes. "Extractivism has appropriated the language of sustainability, but still it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to continue habits of use."

Personal Conflicts

Sara and her family have personally clashed with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent rules on animal husbandry. Previously, Sara's brother embarked on a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the forced culling of his animals, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara produced a extended collection of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive curtain of numerous cranial remains, which was exhibited at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Activism

Among the community, visual expression seems the sole realm in which they can be listened to by outsiders. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|