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Guests to Tate Modern are used to surprising encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an man-made sun, glided down amusement rides, and seen AI-powered jellyfish hovering through the air. However this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this huge space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages patrons into a winding design modeled after the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Inside, they can meander around or chill out on skins, listening on earphones to Sámi elders telling narratives and knowledge.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It may seem quirky, but the artwork honors a rarely recognized scientific wonder: experts have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it breathes in by 80 degrees celsius, allowing the animal to survive in extreme Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "generates a sense of inferiority that you as a person are not superior over nature." She is a former writer, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who comes from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that creates the potential to shift your viewpoint or spark some humility," she states.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The labyrinthine structure is among various elements in Sara's engaging commission showcasing the culture, science, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They've experienced oppression, forced assimilation, and repression of their language by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi belief system and founding narrative, the work also highlights the group's challenges associated with the climate crisis, land dispossession, and external control.

Symbolism in Elements

Along the lengthy access ramp, there's a towering, 26-meter sculpture of pelts trapped by power and light cables. It represents a symbol for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this section of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, in which dense layers of ice develop as varying temperatures liquefy and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary cold-season food, moss. This phenomenon is a consequence of planetary warming, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Far North than elsewhere.

Previously, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in freezing temperatures as they hauled containers of food pellets on to the barren Arctic plains to dispense through labor. The reindeer crowded round us, pawing the slippery ground in futility for mossy morsels. This costly and laborious process is having a significant influence on herding practices—and on the animals' natural survival. However the other option is death. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are dying—a number from starvation, others suffocating after falling into water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. In a sense, the installation is a monument to them. "With the layering of materials, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

The installation also highlights the stark contrast between the western understanding of electricity as a commodity to be utilized for gain and survival and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an inherent life force in creatures, people, and land. Tate Modern's past as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi consider eco-imperialism by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be exemplars for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the development of wind energy projects, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their human rights, ways of life, and culture are at risk. "It's hard being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the reasons are rooted in environmental protection," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has adopted the discourse of sustainability, but nonetheless it's just striving to find alternative ways to continue practices of expenditure."

Family Challenges

Sara and her relatives have themselves conflicted with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent regulations on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's brother embarked on a series of unsuccessful legal cases over the required reduction of his herd, apparently to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara produced a four-year set of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge drape of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the 2017's art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Activism

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