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Visitors to Tate Modern are accustomed to unusual displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an artificial sun, glided down amusement rides, and seen automated jellyfish floating through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nose cavities of a reindeer. The latest artistic project for this huge space—created by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a labyrinthine design inspired by the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Inside, they can stroll around or chill out on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to Sámi elders imparting tales and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It could sound quirky, but the installation pays tribute to a little-known natural marvel: experts have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it inhales by 80°C, enabling the creature to survive in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "creates a sense of smallness that you as a person are not dominant over nature." She is a ex- writer, children's author, and rights advocate, who hails from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that creates the potential to change your perspective or spark some humility," she continues.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The labyrinthine design is among various features in Sara's absorbing art project honoring the traditions, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They've faced oppression, integration policies, and eradication of their dialect by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi belief system and founding narrative, the installation also spotlights the community's challenges connected to the climate crisis, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Meaning in Components

At the long entrance slope, there's a looming, 26-metre sculpture of reindeer hides ensnared by utility lines. It represents a analogy for the political and economic systems restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this part of the artwork, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, in which thick layers of ice develop as varying temperatures liquefy and ice over the snow, locking in the reindeers' primary winter nourishment, fungus. This phenomenon is a outcome of global heating, which is taking place up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than in other regions.

Previously, I met with Sara in a remote town during a icy season and went with Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they hauled containers of animal nutrition on to the exposed Arctic plains to provide through labor. The reindeer surrounded round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain attempts for vegetative morsels. This costly and demanding process is having a severe effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. But the alternative is death. As these icy periods become frequent, reindeer are perishing—a number from hunger, others suffocating after sinking in water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. In a sense, the art is a monument to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

The sculpture also highlights the clear difference between the modern interpretation of electricity as a asset to be utilized for profit and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of life force as an innate life force in creatures, people, and land. Tate Modern's history as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be standard bearers for sustainable power, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the construction of windfarms, water power facilities, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, livelihoods, and way of life are threatened. "It's hard being such a limited population to protect your rights when the arguments are based on global sustainability," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the rhetoric of sustainability, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find better ways to continue practices of expenditure."

Individual Challenges

She and her family have personally clashed with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent policies on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's sibling undertook a set of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the forced culling of his livestock, apparently to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a four-year series of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal curtain of numerous cranial remains, which was shown at the 2017's art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it is displayed in the entryway.

Art as Awareness

Among the community, creative work appears the only realm in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|