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Guests to Tate Modern are accustomed to unexpected experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an simulated sun, slid down spiral slides, and seen AI-powered jellyfish drifting through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this huge space—developed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a winding structure inspired by the expanded inside of a reindeer's nose cavities. Inside, they can wander around or chill out on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to tribal seniors sharing narratives and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

Why choose the nasal structure? It might sound playful, but the installation pays tribute to a obscure natural marvel: researchers have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the ambient air it breathes in by eighty degrees, enabling the animal to thrive in harsh Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "produces a feeling of insignificance that you as a individual are not superior over nature." Sara is a ex- reporter, young adult author, and environmental activist, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that fosters the potential to change your perspective or evoke some humility," she continues.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The labyrinthine installation is among various features in Sara's absorbing art project celebrating the traditions, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Partially migratory, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They've experienced persecution, integration policies, and eradication of their language by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the art also spotlights the group's challenges connected to the climate crisis, property rights, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Elements

At the long entrance ramp, there's a towering, 26-meter formation of reindeer hides ensnared by electrical wires. It represents a symbol for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Part pylon, part heavenly staircase, this component of the artwork, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, wherein dense sheets of ice appear as fluctuating weather liquefy and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' key winter sustenance, moss. The condition is a outcome of global heating, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Polar region than globally.

A few years back, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they hauled containers of animal nutrition on to the barren frozen landscape to distribute by hand. The herd gathered round us, digging the slippery ground in vain attempts for mossy pieces. This resource-intensive and demanding process is having a severe impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. But the alternative is death. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—some from starvation, others submerging after falling into streams through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the work is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Perspectives

This artwork also emphasizes the clear contrast between the modern interpretation of power as a resource to be utilized for profit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of energy as an natural essence in animals, people, and land. The gallery's legacy as a fossil fuel plant is linked with this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by Nordic countries. While attempting to be standard bearers for renewable energy, these states have locked horns with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi assert their legal protections, ways of life, and traditions are threatened. "It's hard being such a limited population to defend yourself when the arguments are grounded in saving the world," Sara observes. "Mining practices has appropriated the discourse of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to persist in habits of use."

Personal Challenges

She and her relatives have themselves clashed with the Norwegian government over its tightening rules on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's sibling initiated a set of finally failed court actions over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara developed a four-year set of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge curtain of 400 animal bones, which was exhibited at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it resides in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Awareness

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