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Visitors to Tate Modern are accustomed to unexpected experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They have basked under an artificial sun, descended down spiral slides, and observed robotic sea creatures hovering through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this immense space—created by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a labyrinthine design inspired by the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Once inside, they can wander around or relax on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to community leaders imparting narratives and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why choose the nasal structure? It may sound playful, but the installation pays tribute to a little-known scientific wonder: scientists have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it breathes in by 80 degrees celsius, allowing the creature to survive in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "generates a perception of smallness that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." The artist is a ex- writer, writer for kids, and land defender, who hails from a pastoral family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that creates the potential to shift your viewpoint or evoke some humility," she states.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The winding installation is one of several elements in Sara's engaging art project showcasing the traditions, knowledge, and philosophy of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They have experienced oppression, forced assimilation, and suppression of their tongue by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the installation also highlights the group's challenges associated with the global warming, property rights, and external control.

Metaphor in Elements

Along the lengthy entrance slope, there's a looming, 26-meter structure of reindeer hides ensnared by electrical wires. It represents a symbol for the societal frameworks restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this part of the exhibit, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which thick sheets of ice form as fluctuating conditions melt and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' main winter nourishment, lichen. This phenomenon is a outcome of planetary warming, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Arctic than elsewhere.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and joined Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they hauled containers of supplementary feed on to the exposed Arctic plains to provide by hand. The reindeer surrounded round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain for vegetative morsels. This costly and demanding method is having a drastic effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the other option is starvation. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—some from lack of food, others submerging after falling into streams through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the work is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Perspectives

This artwork also underscores the clear contrast between the industrial view of power as a asset to be harnessed for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an inherent power in creatures, humans, and nature. This venue's history as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by Nordic countries. While attempting to be standard bearers for clean sources, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of wind energy projects, river barriers, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their human rights, livelihoods, and traditions are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to protect your rights when the justifications are based on global sustainability," Sara observes. "Extractivism has co-opted the language of ecology, but still it's just aiming to find better ways to maintain practices of use."

Individual Challenges

The artist and her kin have themselves conflicted with the Norwegian government over its tightening rules on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's sibling undertook a set of unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara produced a extended series of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi featuring a colossal screen of four hundred cranial remains, which was shown at the the event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it hangs in the entryway.

Art as Activism

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