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Visitors to Tate Modern are used to unusual experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an man-made sun, descended down spiral slides, and witnessed AI-powered jellyfish drifting through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the complex nose passages of a reindeer. The latest artistic project for this huge space—designed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a maze-like structure inspired by the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose cavities. Upon entering, they can stroll around or relax on skins, tuning in on earphones to Sámi elders telling tales and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It might appear quirky, but the artwork honors a little-known natural marvel: researchers have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it breathes in by 80°C, enabling the animal to thrive in inhospitable Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "produces a feeling of inferiority that you as a person are not dominant over nature." The artist is a ex- writer, children's author, and land defender, who is from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that creates the chance to change your outlook or trigger some humility," she continues.

An Homage to Indigenous Heritage

The labyrinthine design is part of a features in Sara's engaging exhibition celebrating the traditions, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total about 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They have experienced persecution, cultural suppression, and eradication of their tongue by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the installation also spotlights the community's struggles associated with the climate crisis, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Meaning in Materials

On the extended entrance ramp, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot sculpture of reindeer hides entangled by utility lines. It represents a metaphor for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this section of the exhibit, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, wherein solid sheets of ice form as fluctuating weather liquefy and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' key cold-season food, moss. The condition is a outcome of climate change, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Far North than globally.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they hauled containers of animal nutrition on to the barren Arctic plains to provide by hand. These animals crowded round us, pawing the slippery ground in futility for lichen-covered pieces. This resource-intensive and laborious procedure is having a significant effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. But the choice is malnutrition. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are succumbing—some from starvation, others submerging after sinking in water bodies through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the art is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

The sculpture also highlights the clear difference between the industrial interpretation of power as a commodity to be utilized for profit and existence and the Sámi outlook of life force as an natural life force in animals, people, and nature. This venue's legacy as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be exemplars for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of windfarms, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi assert their legal protections, livelihoods, and way of life are threatened. "It's hard being such a small minority to stand your ground when the reasons are rooted in saving the world," Sara notes. "Mining practices has co-opted the rhetoric of ecology, but still it's just aiming to find better ways to continue practices of consumption."

Individual Challenges

She and her family have themselves clashed with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent policies on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's sibling initiated a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the forced culling of his herd, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara produced a extended series of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge screen of 400 reindeer skulls, which was shown at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it resides in the entrance.

The Role of Art in Awareness

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