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Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to unexpected experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They have basked under an artificial sun, glided down spiral slides, and observed robotic sea creatures floating through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this immense space—created by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a labyrinthine construction inspired by the expanded inside of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Inside, they can wander around or relax on skins, listening on earphones to community leaders telling tales and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It could sound whimsical, but the artwork pays tribute to a rarely recognized natural marvel: experts have discovered 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 endure in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "generates a feeling of smallness that you as a person are not superior over nature." She is a ex- journalist, writer for kids, and land defender, who is from a pastoral family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that creates the chance to alter your outlook or evoke some modesty," she adds.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The winding installation is among various elements in Sara's engaging exhibition honoring the culture, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They have faced persecution, cultural suppression, and repression of their dialect by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the work also draws attention to the group's issues relating to the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Components

At the long entry ramp, there's a soaring, 26-metre sculpture of reindeer hides entangled by electrical wires. It can be read as a analogy for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this component of the exhibit, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, whereby solid layers of ice appear as fluctuating conditions liquefy and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' main winter nourishment, moss. The condition is a consequence of planetary warming, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Far North than in other regions.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a icy season and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they transported carts of supplementary feed on to the barren frozen landscape to distribute through labor. The reindeer crowded round us, pawing the icy ground in vain attempts for vegetative bits. This costly and labour-intensive method is having a drastic effect on herding practices—and on the animals' natural survival. But the choice is death. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—a number from lack of food, others drowning after falling into water bodies through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the art is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

This artwork also emphasizes the clear difference between the modern interpretation of power as a asset to be exploited for profit and survival and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an innate life force in creatures, humans, and the environment. This venue's history as a fossil fuel plant is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be standard bearers for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have clashed with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their human rights, livelihoods, and way of life are at risk. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to protect your rights when the reasons are rooted in environmental protection," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the discourse of ecology, but still it's just attempting to find better ways to continue practices of consumption."

Individual Challenges

The artist and her relatives have personally conflicted with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter rules on animal husbandry. Previously, Sara's sibling initiated a set of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the forced culling of his animals, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a multi-year collection of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi including a massive curtain of four hundred animal bones, which was shown at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it hangs in the lobby.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

Among the community, art is the only sphere in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|