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Attendees to Tate Modern are familiar to unexpected encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an artificial sun, descended down amusement rides, and witnessed robotic jellyfish drifting through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this immense space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a maze-like structure inspired by the expanded inside of a reindeer's nasal airways. Once inside, they can wander around or relax on reindeer hides, tuning in on headphones to community leaders sharing tales and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It could seem whimsical, but the artwork pays tribute to a rarely recognized scientific wonder: experts have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, allowing the creature to endure in extreme Arctic climates. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "generates a feeling of inferiority that you as a human being are not in control over nature." She is a ex- reporter, children's author, and rights advocate, who is from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that generates the possibility to change your outlook or trigger some humility," she adds.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The winding design is part of a elements in Sara's immersive commission celebrating the traditions, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They have endured persecution, forced assimilation, and repression of their tongue by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi belief system and founding narrative, the installation also highlights the community's challenges relating to the environmental emergency, property rights, and external control.

Metaphor in Elements

Along the long entrance slope, there's a looming, 26-meter formation of reindeer hides trapped by power and light cables. It represents a analogy for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this section of the exhibit, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, in which thick coatings of ice appear as varying temperatures liquefy and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' key cold-season sustenance, lichen. The condition is a result of climate change, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than in other regions.

Previously, I visited Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they hauled trailers of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to dispense by hand. The herd gathered round us, pawing the frozen ground in vain for mossy morsels. This costly and laborious process is having a severe influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the other option is malnutrition. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are perishing—some from starvation, others submerging after falling into streams through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the art is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

The installation also emphasizes the sharp difference between the modern view of electricity as a commodity to be utilized for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi worldview of life force as an inherent power in creatures, individuals, and the environment. This venue's legacy as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be leaders for sustainable power, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, river barriers, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their legal protections, incomes, and traditions are threatened. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to protect your rights when the justifications are grounded in environmental protection," Sara comments. "Mining practices has co-opted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but still it's just aiming to find better ways to maintain habits of use."

Family Struggles

The artist and her kin have personally clashed with the Norwegian government over its tightening regulations on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's brother undertook a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful court actions over the required reduction of his animals, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara developed a four-year collection of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a colossal drape of numerous reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it hangs in the entrance.

The Role of Art in Activism

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