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Guests to Tate Modern are accustomed to unusual displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an simulated sun, descended down helter skelters, and witnessed automated jellyfish floating through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nose cavities of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this immense space—created by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages patrons into a labyrinthine construction modeled after the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Upon entering, they can wander around or relax on pelts, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors telling narratives and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It may sound playful, but the installation honors a rarely recognized scientific wonder: experts have discovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it breathes in by 80 degrees celsius, helping the creature to thrive in harsh Arctic climates. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara explains, "produces a perception of inferiority that you as a human being are not superior over nature." She is a ex- writer, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who hails from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that fosters the chance to shift your perspective or spark some humility," she adds.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The maze-like installation is part of a features in Sara's engaging exhibition honoring the heritage, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi number roughly 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They have experienced persecution, integration policies, and suppression of their language by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the installation also spotlights the group's issues connected to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Meaning in Materials

At the long access slope, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot formation of skins trapped by electrical wires. It represents a symbol for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part spiritual ascent, this section of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an harsh environmental condition, wherein solid coatings of ice appear as changing conditions melt and ice over the snow, locking in the reindeers' main winter nourishment, lichen. Goavvi is a consequence of planetary warming, which is occurring up to four times faster in the Polar region than in other regions.

A few years back, I met with Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they transported containers of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to distribute through labor. The reindeer surrounded round us, scratching the frozen ground in vain attempts for vegetative morsels. This costly and labour-intensive process is having a drastic impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the alternative is malnutrition. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—a number from starvation, others drowning after falling into water bodies through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the art is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

The installation also highlights the stark difference between the western view of electricity as a resource to be harnessed for gain and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an natural life force in animals, individuals, and land. Tate Modern's past as a coal and oil power station is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by regional governments. In their efforts to be standard bearers for clean sources, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the construction of windfarms, river barriers, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi argue their human rights, ways of life, and traditions are threatened. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to protect your rights when the justifications are based on saving the world," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the rhetoric of ecology, but still it's just attempting to find alternative ways to persist in habits of use."

Family Challenges

She and her family have personally clashed with the national administration over its tightening policies on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's sibling initiated a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the required reduction of his livestock, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara produced a multi-year collection of creations named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal screen of numerous reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the national institution, where it resides in the entryway.

Art as Advocacy

Among the community, visual expression seems the exclusive sphere in which they can be heard by people of other nations. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|