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Attendees to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They've basked under an artificial sun, slid down spiral slides, and witnessed AI-powered jellyfish drifting through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nose cavities of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this cavernous space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a labyrinthine construction modeled after the expanded inside of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Upon entering, they can stroll around or unwind on reindeer hides, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors telling narratives and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

Why choose the nasal structure? It might sound playful, but the installation pays tribute to a rarely recognized biological feat: experts have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the surrounding air it inhales by 80°C, helping the animal to endure in harsh Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "creates a feeling of smallness that you as a human being are not in control over nature." Sara is a ex- reporter, children's author, and rights advocate, who hails from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that generates the chance to alter your outlook or evoke some humility," she continues.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The winding installation is part of a elements in Sara's engaging commission celebrating the culture, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They've experienced persecution, integration policies, and suppression of their dialect by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi mythology and origin tale, the art also draws attention to the community's challenges relating to the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Elements

On the long entry incline, there's a towering, 26-meter structure of skins trapped by power and light cables. It represents a metaphor for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part heavenly staircase, this component of the exhibit, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an severe climatic event, wherein dense coatings of ice appear as varying temperatures thaw and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' main winter nourishment, moss. The condition is a result of planetary warming, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than in other regions.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in a remote town during a icy season and went with Sámi herders on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they transported trailers of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured tundra to provide by hand. These animals surrounded round us, digging the icy ground in futility for mossy pieces. This costly and labour-intensive process is having a drastic influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the other option is death. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are dying—a number from hunger, others submerging after sinking in lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the installation is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of elements, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Perspectives

This artwork also highlights the clear difference between the modern interpretation of electricity as a commodity to be harnessed for gain and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of life force as an natural power in animals, individuals, and the environment. Tate Modern's history as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by regional governments. As they strive to be standard bearers for renewable energy, Nordic nations have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, water power facilities, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their legal protections, livelihoods, and way of life are endangered. "It's hard being such a limited population to defend yourself when the justifications are grounded in saving the world," Sara notes. "Extractivism has co-opted the language of sustainability, but yet it's just aiming to find better ways to persist in patterns of consumption."

Individual Challenges

The artist and her kin have themselves clashed with the Norwegian government over its tightening regulations on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's brother embarked on a sequence of unsuccessful lawsuits over the forced culling of his livestock, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a multi-year collection of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge screen of 400 reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it resides in the entrance.

Art as Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, visual expression is the sole realm in which they can be heard by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|