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Visitors to Tate Modern are used to unexpected displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an simulated sun, slid down helter skelters, and witnessed robotic sea creatures drifting through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nasal cavities of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this huge space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a winding structure based on the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nose cavities. Once inside, they can stroll around or unwind on skins, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors sharing stories and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

Why choose the nasal structure? It may sound playful, but the installation pays tribute to a obscure scientific wonder: researchers have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it inhales by 80 degrees celsius, helping the animal to endure in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "creates a feeling of inferiority that you as a person are not superior over nature." She is a ex- writer, young adult author, and environmental activist, who hails from a herding family in northern Norway. "Maybe that generates the potential to change your outlook or evoke some modesty," she states.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The labyrinthine structure is part of a components in Sara's absorbing art project honoring the culture, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They've experienced discrimination, forced assimilation, and repression of their dialect by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi mythology and origin tale, the art also highlights the community's challenges associated with the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Components

At the long entrance slope, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot structure of pelts entangled by utility lines. It can be read as a metaphor for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this component of the installation, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which thick sheets of ice form as varying temperatures liquefy and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' main winter nourishment, fungus. This phenomenon is a result of planetary warming, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than globally.

Previously, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a icy season and joined Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they carried trailers of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured tundra to provide manually. The reindeer crowded round us, scratching the slippery ground in futility for lichen-covered bits. This expensive and demanding process is having a drastic effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. But the choice is death. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are dying—a number from hunger, others suffocating after plunging into lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the art is a tribute to them. "With the layering of elements, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Perspectives

This artwork also underscores the stark contrast between the western interpretation of power as a resource to be utilized for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi outlook of life force as an innate power in creatures, individuals, and land. The gallery's legacy as a coal and oil power station is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be leaders for renewable energy, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the development of windfarms, water power facilities, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their legal protections, livelihoods, and culture are endangered. "It's hard being such a small minority to protect your rights when the arguments are based on global sustainability," Sara observes. "Extractivism has adopted the language of environmentalism, but still it's just aiming to find alternative ways to persist in practices of use."

Family Struggles

The artist and her relatives have themselves clashed with the state authorities over its tightening rules on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's sibling embarked on a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the forced culling of his livestock, supposedly to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a four-year set of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi including a huge drape of numerous animal bones, which was displayed at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the public gallery, where it hangs in the lobby.

Art as Advocacy

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work is the sole realm in which they can be understood by outsiders. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|