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Guests to Tate Modern are used to surprising displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an simulated sun, slid down helter skelters, and witnessed robotic sea creatures floating through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this huge space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a labyrinthine construction modeled after the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose passages. Once inside, they can stroll around or unwind on skins, listening on headphones to tribal seniors imparting narratives and wisdom.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It may seem quirky, but the installation celebrates a little-known biological feat: scientists have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it inhales by eighty degrees, helping the creature to thrive in harsh Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "produces a sense of insignificance that you as a person are not in control over nature." The artist is a ex- journalist, young adult author, and rights advocate, who hails from a pastoral family in northern Norway. "Maybe that generates the potential to shift your viewpoint or evoke some humbleness," she continues.

An Homage to Indigenous Heritage

The labyrinthine design is part of a elements in Sara's engaging commission showcasing the traditions, knowledge, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number about 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They have faced oppression, forced assimilation, and suppression of their tongue by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the work also highlights the group's issues associated with the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Elements

At the long access ramp, there's a towering, 26-meter sculpture of skins entangled by power and light cables. It serves as a metaphor for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this part of the exhibit, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an severe climatic event, in which solid coatings of ice form as changing weather liquefy and ice over the snow, locking in the reindeers' main winter nourishment, fungus. This phenomenon is a outcome of global heating, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Far North than globally.

A few years back, I met with Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and went with Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they hauled trailers of animal nutrition on to the exposed frozen landscape to distribute through labor. These animals surrounded round us, digging the slippery ground in futility for lichen-covered bits. This expensive and labour-intensive procedure is having a severe impact on herding practices—and on the animals' natural survival. However the choice is starvation. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—some from starvation, others submerging after plunging into streams through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the art is a monument to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Perspectives

The installation also highlights the stark difference between the western understanding of power as a commodity to be utilized for profit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an inherent life force in creatures, people, and land. Tate Modern's past as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by Nordic countries. As they strive to be standard bearers for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their human rights, ways of life, and traditions are threatened. "It's hard being such a limited population to protect your rights when the arguments are rooted in global sustainability," Sara comments. "Resource exploitation has adopted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but still it's just striving to find alternative ways to maintain habits of use."

Personal Challenges

The artist and her family have personally disagreed with the state authorities over its ever-stricter rules on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's brother initiated a series of finally failed court actions over the required reduction of his herd, apparently to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara created a extended series of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a colossal drape of 400 reindeer skulls, which was shown at the 2017's art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it hangs in the entrance.

Art as Activism

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