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Visitors to Tate Modern are accustomed to surprising encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an simulated sun, descended down helter skelters, and seen automated sea creatures hovering through the air. However this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nasal chambers of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this huge space—designed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a maze-like design modeled after the expanded interior of a reindeer's nasal airways. Inside, they can wander around or relax on pelts, tuning in on earphones to Sámi elders telling stories and insights.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It may sound quirky, but the artwork celebrates a rarely recognized biological feat: scientists have discovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it takes in by eighty degrees, helping the creature to thrive in harsh Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "produces a feeling of insignificance that you as a person are not superior over nature." She is a former reporter, young adult author, and land defender, who is from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that generates the possibility to change your viewpoint or evoke some modesty," she states.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The winding installation is part of a elements in Sara's absorbing exhibition celebrating the heritage, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They have experienced oppression, cultural suppression, and eradication of their language by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the art also highlights the group's challenges connected to the environmental emergency, property rights, and external control.

Meaning in Materials

On the lengthy access slope, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot sculpture of skins ensnared by power and light cables. It represents a analogy for the societal frameworks restricting the Sámi. Part pylon, part heavenly staircase, this component of the installation, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, wherein thick sheets of ice appear as fluctuating weather melt and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' key cold-season sustenance, fungus. Goavvi is a result of global heating, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they hauled trailers of supplementary feed on to the barren tundra to provide by hand. These animals gathered round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain attempts for mossy bits. This expensive and laborious process is having a significant effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. But the other option is death. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—a number from lack of food, others drowning after falling into water bodies through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the work is a monument to them. "With the layering of elements, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

This artwork also highlights the clear divergence between the modern interpretation of electricity as a asset to be exploited for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an innate essence in animals, humans, and nature. The gallery's history as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by Nordic countries. In their efforts to be exemplars for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, water power facilities, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi contend their human rights, ways of life, and way of life are endangered. "It's hard being such a tiny group to protect your rights when the reasons are rooted in global sustainability," Sara comments. "Extractivism has appropriated the rhetoric of sustainability, but yet it's just attempting to find better ways to maintain practices of expenditure."

Family Challenges

Sara and her kin have personally conflicted with the state authorities over its increasingly stringent policies on herding. A few years ago, Sara's sibling undertook a series of unsuccessful court actions over the required reduction of his livestock, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara produced a multi-year series of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive curtain of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it resides in the lobby.

Art as Activism

For many Sámi, art appears the exclusive sphere in which they can be listened to by the global community. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|