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Visitors to Tate Modern are accustomed to unusual experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an artificial sun, descended down amusement rides, and seen AI-powered sea creatures drifting through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nose passages of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this cavernous space—created by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes patrons into a labyrinthine design modeled after the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Upon entering, they can meander around or relax on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to Sámi elders imparting tales and insights.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It could appear playful, but the artwork pays tribute to a little-known scientific wonder: scientists have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it inhales by eighty degrees, helping the animal to thrive in extreme Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "generates a perception of smallness that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." Sara is a former journalist, writer for kids, and land defender, who is from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Possibly that generates the possibility to change your viewpoint or evoke some humbleness," she adds.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The winding structure is part of a features in Sara's engaging exhibition showcasing the culture, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They've experienced persecution, 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 origin tale, the art also spotlights the group's issues associated with the climate crisis, land dispossession, and external control.

Symbolism in Elements

Along the lengthy entrance ramp, there's a soaring, 26-metre sculpture of pelts entangled by electrical wires. It serves as a symbol for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this component of the installation, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein dense layers of ice form as varying conditions melt and ice over the snow, locking in the reindeers' key cold-season food, lichen. Goavvi is a outcome of planetary warming, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than elsewhere.

Previously, I visited Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they carried trailers of animal nutrition on to the barren frozen landscape to distribute manually. The reindeer surrounded round us, pawing the frozen ground in vain attempts for lichen-covered morsels. This costly and laborious method is having a significant impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. However the alternative is malnutrition. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—some from starvation, others suffocating after sinking in lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. In a sense, the art is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Perspectives

This artwork also underscores the clear difference between the western interpretation of power as a resource to be exploited for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an innate power in animals, humans, and nature. This venue's history as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as eco-imperialism by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be exemplars for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, river barriers, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi contend their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and culture are endangered. "It's hard being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the reasons are grounded in global sustainability," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the language of sustainability, but yet it's just attempting to find alternative ways to maintain practices of consumption."

Personal Struggles

The artist and her relatives have themselves disagreed with the national administration over its tightening policies on herding. A few years ago, Sara's brother undertook a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the required reduction of his livestock, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara developed a extended collection of creations called Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive screen of 400 cranial remains, which was displayed at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

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