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Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an man-made sun, slid down spiral slides, and observed robotic sea creatures drifting through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the complex nose chambers of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this huge space—designed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a maze-like construction inspired by the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Inside, they can meander around or chill out on skins, tuning in on earphones to Sámi elders telling stories and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

Why choose the nasal structure? It could seem quirky, but the exhibit celebrates a obscure natural marvel: scientists have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it breathes in by eighty degrees, enabling the creature to endure in extreme Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "generates a perception of insignificance that you as a person are not superior over nature." Sara is a ex- journalist, children's author, and land defender, who is from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that generates the chance to shift your viewpoint or spark some modesty," she adds.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The winding installation is part of a elements in Sara's absorbing exhibition honoring the culture, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They have endured persecution, forced assimilation, and eradication of their language by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi belief system and founding narrative, the installation also spotlights the community's challenges relating to the global warming, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Components

At the extended access slope, there's a towering, eighty-five-foot formation of pelts trapped by utility lines. It serves as a metaphor for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part heavenly staircase, this component of the installation, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an severe climatic event, wherein solid coatings of ice appear as fluctuating conditions liquefy and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' key winter sustenance, lichen. This phenomenon is a consequence of global heating, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Polar region than in other regions.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they hauled trailers of food pellets on to the exposed Arctic plains to distribute through labor. The reindeer surrounded round us, pawing the frozen ground in futility for vegetative pieces. This resource-intensive and demanding method is having a significant impact on herding practices—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the other option is malnutrition. As these icy periods become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—a number from hunger, others submerging after plunging into lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the installation is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Perspectives

The sculpture also emphasizes the sharp difference between the western understanding of power as a resource to be harnessed for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of energy as an inherent essence in creatures, humans, and land. Tate Modern's past as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by regional governments. As they strive to be leaders for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, river barriers, and mines on their traditional territory; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and way of life are at risk. "It's challenging being such a small minority to protect your rights when the reasons are based on saving the world," Sara comments. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the discourse of sustainability, but yet it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to continue practices of use."

Family Challenges

Sara and her kin have themselves disagreed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent regulations on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's sibling initiated a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara produced a extended collection of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi including a massive screen of numerous reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the lobby.

Art as Activism

For many Sámi, art seems the exclusive sphere in which they can be heard by outsiders. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|