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Attendees to Tate Modern are accustomed to surprising encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've basked under an man-made sun, glided down amusement rides, and observed AI-powered jellyfish drifting through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nasal passages of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this cavernous space—created by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a labyrinthine design inspired by the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nose cavities. Inside, they can wander around or unwind on pelts, tuning in on earphones to Sámi elders sharing narratives and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It might seem quirky, but the installation pays tribute to a rarely recognized natural marvel: experts have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the ambient air it inhales by 80°C, enabling the creature to survive in harsh Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "generates a perception of insignificance that you as a person are not in control over nature." The artist is a ex- journalist, young adult author, and land defender, who hails from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that fosters the possibility to change your outlook or trigger some humbleness," she states.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The maze-like installation is part of a elements in Sara's immersive exhibition celebrating the culture, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number roughly 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They've faced oppression, cultural suppression, and suppression of their dialect by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the work also spotlights the community's issues connected to the environmental emergency, property rights, and colonialism.

Meaning in Components

On the long entrance incline, there's a towering, eighty-five-foot formation of pelts trapped by power and light cables. It serves as a analogy for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part heavenly staircase, this section of the installation, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein dense layers of ice develop as fluctuating weather melt and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' main cold-season nourishment, lichen. The condition is a outcome of global heating, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than globally.

A few years back, I met with Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they hauled containers of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to distribute by hand. The reindeer surrounded round us, scratching the icy ground in vain attempts for vegetative pieces. This costly and laborious method is having a drastic impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. But the alternative is starvation. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—some from lack of food, others suffocating after falling into streams through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the work is a monument to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

This artwork also underscores the stark contrast between the western view of electricity as a resource to be exploited for profit and survival and the Sámi worldview of life force as an innate life force in creatures, individuals, and nature. Tate Modern's past as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by regional governments. In their efforts to be exemplars for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their human rights, ways of life, and culture are at risk. "It's hard being such a small minority to stand your ground when the justifications are based on saving the world," Sara notes. "Extractivism has appropriated the language of ecology, but yet it's just attempting to find better ways to continue practices of expenditure."

Personal Struggles

Sara and her relatives have personally conflicted with the state authorities over its ever-stricter policies on herding. In 2016, Sara's brother embarked on a set of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the forced culling of his herd, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara produced a extended collection of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge drape of numerous reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Activism

For many Sámi, visual expression seems the only sphere in which they can be understood by people of other nations. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|