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Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to unexpected experiences in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've basked under an man-made sun, slid down helter skelters, and witnessed automated sea creatures drifting through the air. Yet this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the complex nasal passages of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this cavernous space—designed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes patrons into a winding structure modeled after the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose cavities. Once inside, they can wander around or unwind on skins, tuning in on earphones to tribal seniors telling tales and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why choose the nasal structure? It could sound playful, but the artwork pays tribute to a little-known biological feat: experts have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the surrounding air it inhales by eighty degrees, enabling the creature to survive in harsh Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "produces a sense of smallness that you as a individual are not superior over nature." Sara is a former journalist, children's author, and rights advocate, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Possibly that generates the possibility to shift your viewpoint or evoke some humbleness," she states.

A Tribute to Indigenous Heritage

The labyrinthine structure is one of several components in Sara's absorbing art project showcasing the traditions, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They've endured oppression, forced assimilation, and repression of their tongue by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the art also highlights the group's struggles relating to the environmental emergency, property rights, and imperialism.

Meaning in Components

On the long entry incline, there's a soaring, 26-metre sculpture of reindeer hides ensnared by power and light cables. It serves as a analogy for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part spiritual ascent, this section of the artwork, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby dense sheets of ice form as changing weather liquefy and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' main cold-season sustenance, lichen. Goavvi is a outcome of global heating, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Far North than elsewhere.

Previously, I traveled to see Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and joined Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they transported trailers of food pellets on to the wind-scoured tundra to provide through labor. The reindeer crowded round us, digging the frozen ground in vain for vegetative bits. This costly and demanding procedure is having a significant influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. But the alternative is starvation. As these icy periods become routine, reindeer are perishing—a number from lack of food, others suffocating after plunging into lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the art is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

The sculpture also highlights the sharp contrast between the western view of electricity as a asset to be exploited for gain and survival and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an natural essence in animals, people, and land. The gallery's past as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by Nordic countries. As they strive to be exemplars for sustainable power, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of windfarms, river barriers, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi assert their legal protections, livelihoods, and way of life are at risk. "It's challenging being such a small minority to defend yourself when the arguments are grounded in saving the world," Sara comments. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the rhetoric of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find alternative ways to persist in habits of use."

Family Struggles

She and her family have themselves disagreed with the state authorities over its tightening policies on animal husbandry. Previously, Sara's brother initiated a sequence of finally failed court actions over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara developed a four-year set of creations named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive screen of numerous animal bones, which was shown at the the show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the lobby.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For many Sámi, art seems the only domain in which they can be listened to by outsiders. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|