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Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to surprising encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an simulated sun, glided down amusement rides, and witnessed AI-powered sea creatures floating through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nose cavities of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this immense space—developed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a maze-like design inspired by the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Inside, they can meander around or unwind on skins, tuning in on earphones to community leaders sharing tales and wisdom.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It could sound playful, but the installation honors a rarely recognized scientific wonder: researchers have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it inhales by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the creature to endure in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "produces a sense of smallness that you as a person are not dominant over nature." She is a ex- writer, young adult author, and rights advocate, who is from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that creates the potential to change your viewpoint or evoke some humbleness," she continues.

A Tribute to Indigenous Heritage

The winding structure is among various components in Sara's engaging exhibition honoring the culture, understanding, and philosophy of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They have faced persecution, cultural suppression, and suppression of their tongue by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the installation also highlights the group's issues relating to the climate crisis, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Components

At the extended access slope, there's a towering, eighty-five-foot sculpture of reindeer hides ensnared by utility lines. It can be read as a symbol for the political and economic systems restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part heavenly staircase, this part of the exhibit, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, wherein thick sheets of ice appear as fluctuating weather thaw and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' key winter nourishment, fungus. The condition is a outcome of climate change, which is happening up to four times faster in the Polar region than elsewhere.

Previously, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and went with Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they carried trailers of animal nutrition on to the exposed tundra to distribute by hand. The herd crowded round us, pawing the icy ground in vain for mossy morsels. This resource-intensive and laborious process is having a drastic influence on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the other option is malnutrition. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—some from hunger, others drowning after falling into water bodies through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the work is a monument to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm introducing the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Perspectives

The sculpture also highlights the stark divergence between the western understanding of electricity as a asset to be utilized for gain and survival and the Sámi worldview of energy as an innate life force in creatures, people, and nature. The gallery's legacy as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be leaders for sustainable power, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the construction of windfarms, water power facilities, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their legal protections, incomes, and traditions are endangered. "It's hard being such a small minority to protect your rights when the justifications are rooted in saving the world," Sara comments. "Extractivism has adopted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just attempting to find better ways to continue practices of use."

Family Challenges

Sara and her family have themselves clashed with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter regulations on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's brother initiated a set of ultimately unsuccessful court actions over the forced culling of his animals, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara produced a extended collection of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal drape of numerous reindeer skulls, which was shown at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, art seems the sole sphere in which they can be heard by the global community. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|