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Visitors to Tate Modern are used to unusual encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an artificial sun, glided down helter skelters, and seen robotic sea creatures hovering through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the complex nasal cavities of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this cavernous space—designed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a maze-like structure inspired by the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nasal airways. Upon entering, they can stroll around or unwind on skins, listening on headphones to Sámi elders sharing narratives and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It may appear whimsical, but the installation honors a little-known scientific wonder: researchers have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the creature to thrive in inhospitable Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "generates a feeling of inferiority that you as a individual are not in control over nature." She is a ex- writer, writer for kids, and land defender, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that generates the potential to shift your viewpoint or spark some modesty," she adds.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The maze-like structure is part of a elements in Sara's absorbing art project honoring the culture, knowledge, and philosophy of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They've endured persecution, integration policies, and repression of their tongue by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the work also highlights the community's challenges connected to the global warming, land dispossession, and external control.

Metaphor in Materials

Along the lengthy access incline, there's a towering, eighty-five-foot structure of skins ensnared by power and light cables. It can be read as a analogy for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this part of the exhibit, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi word for an severe climatic event, wherein thick layers of ice form as changing conditions liquefy and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' main winter nourishment, fungus. Goavvi is a consequence of global heating, which is occurring up to four times faster in the Polar region than globally.

Previously, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they hauled trailers of supplementary feed on to the exposed Arctic plains to provide manually. The reindeer gathered round us, pawing the slippery ground in futility for mossy pieces. This costly and demanding process is having a significant effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the choice is death. As these icy periods become routine, reindeer are dying—a number from hunger, others suffocating after plunging into water bodies through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the installation is a tribute to them. "With the layering of elements, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

This artwork also underscores the stark contrast between the western interpretation of electricity as a asset to be exploited for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an inherent life force in creatures, individuals, and land. Tate Modern's history as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi consider environmental exploitation by Nordic countries. While attempting to be standard bearers for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of windfarms, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their human rights, incomes, and way of life are endangered. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to stand your ground when the justifications are grounded in saving the world," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has adopted the discourse of sustainability, but yet it's just striving to find alternative ways to persist in practices of expenditure."

Individual Struggles

She and her family have personally disagreed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent policies on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's sibling undertook a series of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the required reduction of his livestock, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara developed a extended set of creations named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal screen of four hundred animal bones, which was exhibited at the 2017 event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it hangs in the entryway.

Art as Advocacy

For numerous Indigenous people, art is the sole sphere in which they can be listened to by outsiders. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|