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Guests to Tate Modern are used to unexpected encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've basked under an simulated sun, slid down amusement rides, and witnessed AI-powered sea creatures hovering through the air. But this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nose chambers of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this cavernous space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a winding construction based on the expanded interior of a reindeer's nasal airways. Inside, they can meander around or relax on pelts, tuning in on earphones to community leaders sharing narratives and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why the nose? It could sound playful, but the artwork honors a little-known natural marvel: scientists have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the ambient air it inhales by eighty degrees, allowing the animal to thrive in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara explains, "produces a perception of insignificance that you as a individual are not in control over nature." The artist is a ex- reporter, young adult author, and land defender, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that generates the possibility to shift your viewpoint or trigger some humbleness," she adds.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The winding structure is among various elements in Sara's absorbing art project honoring the traditions, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They've experienced discrimination, cultural suppression, and repression of their language 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 group's challenges connected to the global warming, loss of territory, and external control.

Meaning in Components

Along the long entrance slope, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot formation of pelts ensnared by utility lines. It can be read as a symbol for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this component of the exhibit, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an harsh environmental condition, in which solid layers of ice develop as fluctuating conditions thaw and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' main cold-season food, moss. This phenomenon is a result of global heating, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Far North than in other regions.

Previously, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and went with Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they hauled carts of food pellets on to the barren tundra to distribute by hand. These animals gathered round us, scratching the slippery ground in futility for lichen-covered bits. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive process is having a severe influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the alternative is starvation. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are succumbing—a number from hunger, others suffocating after sinking in lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the art is a monument to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

The installation also emphasizes the sharp contrast between the western view of energy as a asset to be exploited for gain and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of energy as an innate essence in creatures, humans, and nature. This venue's past as a fossil fuel plant is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be leaders for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, river barriers, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi assert their legal protections, ways of life, and traditions are threatened. "It's challenging being such a small minority to stand your ground when the justifications are based on saving the world," Sara comments. "Extractivism has co-opted the language of ecology, but yet it's just attempting to find better ways to continue practices of consumption."

Family Struggles

She and her family have personally clashed with the Norwegian government over its tightening policies on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's brother initiated a series of unsuccessful court actions over the forced culling of his animals, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara produced a multi-year collection of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi including a huge drape of four hundred cranial remains, which was displayed at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

Among the community, visual expression seems the exclusive domain in which they can be understood by outsiders. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|