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Attendees to Tate Modern are used to surprising displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an man-made sun, glided down amusement rides, and seen automated sea creatures floating through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nose chambers of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes patrons into a labyrinthine structure modeled after the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nasal airways. Upon entering, they can wander around or relax on skins, listening on earphones to tribal seniors imparting tales and insights.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It may sound whimsical, but the installation pays tribute to a little-known scientific wonder: experts have discovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the ambient air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, helping the creature to thrive in inhospitable Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "generates a sense of inferiority that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." She is a ex- reporter, writer for kids, and land defender, who is from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that fosters the potential to shift your viewpoint or evoke some humbleness," she continues.

An Homage to Indigenous Heritage

The maze-like design is among various components in Sara's absorbing art project honoring the heritage, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They've faced oppression, cultural suppression, and eradication of their language by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the installation also spotlights the community's struggles connected to the environmental emergency, property rights, and imperialism.

Meaning in Components

At the long entrance incline, there's a soaring, 26-metre structure of reindeer hides ensnared by power and light cables. It represents a metaphor for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Part pylon, part heavenly staircase, this component of the installation, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, whereby solid layers of ice form as changing weather thaw and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' key winter nourishment, fungus. Goavvi is a result of global heating, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than elsewhere.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi herders on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they carried trailers of food pellets on to the exposed Arctic plains to dispense manually. These animals crowded round us, pawing the icy ground in futility for mossy morsels. This expensive and labour-intensive method is having a drastic influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. However the alternative is malnutrition. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—a number from hunger, others suffocating after plunging into water bodies through thinning ice sheets. 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

The installation also emphasizes the sharp divergence between the industrial understanding of electricity as a resource to be utilized for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi worldview of energy as an innate power in animals, humans, and the environment. This venue's legacy as a fossil fuel plant is connected to this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be standard bearers for clean sources, Nordic nations have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their human rights, incomes, and traditions are threatened. "It's challenging being such a limited population to protect your rights when the arguments are grounded in global sustainability," Sara comments. "Mining practices has appropriated the rhetoric of sustainability, but still it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to continue practices of expenditure."

Family Challenges

The artist and her family have themselves conflicted with the national administration over its increasingly stringent rules on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's sibling initiated a series of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara developed a multi-year set of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive curtain of numerous animal bones, which was exhibited at the the show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it resides in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

For many Sámi, visual expression appears the only domain in which they can be understood by the global community. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|