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Attendees to Tate Modern are familiar to surprising displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an man-made sun, slid down amusement rides, and observed automated jellyfish floating through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this cavernous space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes patrons into a maze-like design based on the expanded inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Once inside, they can wander around or chill out on skins, listening on headphones to community leaders imparting narratives and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It might sound whimsical, but the artwork celebrates a rarely recognized scientific wonder: researchers have discovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it inhales by 80°C, allowing the creature to endure in inhospitable Arctic climates. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara notes, "creates a perception of insignificance that you as a individual are not in control over nature." Sara is a former writer, writer for kids, and land defender, who comes from a pastoral family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that creates the chance to shift your outlook or evoke some humility," she continues.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The maze-like installation is part of a features in Sara's absorbing commission honoring the traditions, science, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi total about 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They have faced oppression, cultural suppression, and repression of their tongue by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi belief system and founding narrative, the installation also draws attention to the group's struggles associated with the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and external control.

Meaning in Elements

Along the lengthy entrance ramp, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot structure of skins entangled by electrical wires. It can be read as a analogy for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Part pylon, part heavenly staircase, this section of the exhibit, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby dense layers of ice develop as varying conditions liquefy and ice over the snow, locking in the reindeers' primary winter nourishment, moss. The condition is a result of climate change, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi herders on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they transported trailers of supplementary feed on to the exposed frozen landscape to provide by hand. The herd surrounded round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain attempts for vegetative bits. This costly and demanding method is having a drastic influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. Yet the other option is death. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—some from lack of food, others suffocating after sinking in streams through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the work is a monument to them. "With the layering of elements, in a way I'm introducing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

This artwork also highlights the sharp difference between the industrial understanding of power as a asset to be utilized for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of life force as an inherent life force in animals, individuals, and nature. This venue's history as a fossil fuel plant is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by Nordic countries. As they strive to be exemplars for renewable energy, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the development of windfarms, hydroelectric dams, and mines on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and way of life are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to stand your ground when the arguments are based on global sustainability," Sara observes. "Mining practices has adopted the language of environmentalism, but still it's just attempting to find alternative ways to maintain practices of consumption."

Individual Conflicts

She and her relatives have themselves conflicted with the national administration over its ever-stricter regulations on herding. A few years ago, Sara's brother undertook a series of finally failed legal cases over the required reduction of his animals, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara created a four-year collection of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal curtain of 400 cranial remains, which was displayed at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

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