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Visitors to Tate Modern are accustomed to unexpected experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an simulated sun, slid down helter skelters, and observed automated sea creatures drifting through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be venturing themselves in the complex nasal chambers of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a maze-like structure modeled after the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Upon entering, they can meander around or unwind on skins, listening on headphones to community leaders telling narratives and wisdom.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It may sound playful, but the installation celebrates a rarely recognized scientific wonder: researchers have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it breathes in by 80°C, enabling the creature to thrive in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "produces a feeling of inferiority that you as a person are not in control over nature." Sara is a ex- journalist, children's author, and environmental activist, who comes from a herding family in northern Norway. "Possibly that generates the chance to shift your perspective or evoke some humility," she continues.

A Tribute to Traditional Ways

The winding structure is part of a components in Sara's engaging exhibition celebrating the traditions, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi number about 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They've endured oppression, forced assimilation, and suppression of their language by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the work also draws attention to the people's issues associated with the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Elements

Along the long entrance ramp, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot structure of reindeer hides trapped by power and light cables. It represents a analogy for the political and economic systems restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this section of the exhibit, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby thick sheets of ice appear as changing weather melt and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary cold-season food, fungus. Goavvi is a result of global heating, which is happening up to four times faster in the Far North than in other regions.

Three years ago, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a icy season and went with Sámi herders on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they transported carts of supplementary feed on to the exposed tundra to dispense manually. These animals crowded round us, digging the icy ground in futility for vegetative bits. This resource-intensive and demanding method is having a drastic impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the alternative is starvation. As these icy periods become routine, reindeer are perishing—a number from hunger, others drowning after plunging into water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the installation is a memorial to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm introducing the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Perspectives

The sculpture also highlights the sharp contrast between the modern interpretation of power as a commodity to be utilized for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi outlook of energy as an innate essence in creatures, humans, and land. The gallery's history as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by Nordic countries. As they strive to be leaders for sustainable power, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of wind energy projects, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and culture are threatened. "It's hard being such a limited population to stand your ground when the justifications are grounded in environmental protection," Sara comments. "Mining practices has appropriated the language of ecology, but nonetheless it's just striving to find more suitable ways to persist in habits of expenditure."

Family Conflicts

The artist and her family have personally disagreed with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent regulations on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's sibling initiated a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, supposedly to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara created a four-year collection of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a colossal screen of four hundred cranial remains, which was displayed at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it is displayed in the entryway.

Art as Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, art seems the only realm in which they can be understood by the global community. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|