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Visitors to Tate Modern are accustomed to unusual experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They've basked under an artificial sun, glided down spiral slides, and seen AI-powered sea creatures hovering through the air. Yet this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the complex nose passages of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this cavernous space—developed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a maze-like construction inspired by the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose cavities. Upon entering, they can stroll around or relax on skins, tuning in on earphones to tribal seniors telling narratives and wisdom.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It might sound quirky, but the installation pays tribute to a obscure scientific wonder: experts have found that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the creature to thrive in harsh Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "produces a feeling of smallness that you as a person are not superior over nature." She is a ex- journalist, writer for kids, and environmental activist, who hails from a pastoral family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that fosters the potential to alter your outlook or evoke some humbleness," she adds.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The winding design is part of a elements in Sara's engaging exhibition celebrating the culture, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They've faced oppression, integration policies, and repression of their language by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the work also draws attention to the group's issues associated with the environmental emergency, property rights, and colonialism.

Meaning in Components

Along the extended entrance ramp, there's a looming, 26-meter sculpture of reindeer hides ensnared by utility lines. It represents a metaphor for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this part of the artwork, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi word for an severe climatic event, wherein solid sheets of ice develop as varying temperatures liquefy and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' primary winter nourishment, moss. The condition is a consequence of planetary warming, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in freezing temperatures as they carried containers of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to dispense through labor. The herd crowded round us, scratching the icy ground in vain for lichen-covered bits. This expensive and labour-intensive process is having a significant influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. However the other option is malnutrition. As goavvi winters become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—a number from lack of food, others submerging after plunging into lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the installation is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

The sculpture also underscores the stark contrast between the western understanding of energy as a commodity to be exploited for gain and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of life force as an inherent essence in creatures, people, and the environment. The gallery's legacy as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi consider environmental exploitation by Nordic countries. While attempting to be exemplars for clean sources, these states have locked horns with the Sámi over the development of wind energy projects, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi assert their legal protections, ways of life, and way of life are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to protect your rights when the justifications are rooted in global sustainability," Sara comments. "Mining practices has co-opted the discourse of sustainability, but yet it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to persist in practices of expenditure."

Individual Struggles

Sara and her relatives have personally clashed with the state authorities over its increasingly stringent policies on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's sibling initiated a sequence of finally failed legal cases over the forced culling of his animals, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a four-year collection of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a colossal drape of four hundred cranial remains, which was displayed at the the show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it is displayed in the entryway.

The Role of Art in Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, art is the exclusive sphere in which they can be understood by the global community. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|