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Guests to Tate Modern are used to surprising displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've basked under an artificial sun, descended down amusement rides, and seen robotic sea creatures hovering through the air. But this marks the first time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nose cavities of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this cavernous space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages patrons into a maze-like structure inspired by the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Once inside, they can stroll around or unwind on reindeer hides, tuning in on earphones to Sámi elders imparting tales and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why choose the nasal structure? It might seem playful, but the artwork honors a rarely recognized natural marvel: experts have found that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the ambient air it inhales by 80°C, allowing the creature to thrive in inhospitable Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "generates a sense of insignificance that you as a person are not superior over nature." Sara is a former journalist, young adult author, and environmental activist, who comes from a pastoral family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that fosters the chance to shift your outlook or evoke some humility," she adds.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The winding design is part of a components in Sara's absorbing exhibition showcasing the culture, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi count about 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They have endured discrimination, integration policies, and repression of their language by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the art also highlights the community's issues relating to the climate crisis, land dispossession, and external control.

Meaning in Components

At the extended entrance ramp, there's a looming, 26-meter structure of reindeer hides ensnared by utility lines. It can be read as a symbol for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part heavenly staircase, this part of the artwork, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an severe climatic event, wherein solid layers of ice appear as varying temperatures liquefy and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary cold-season sustenance, moss. The condition is a outcome of planetary warming, which is happening up to four times faster in the Polar region than elsewhere.

Previously, I visited Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in freezing temperatures as they transported trailers of food pellets on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to provide through labor. The herd crowded round us, digging the frozen ground in vain for vegetative morsels. This resource-intensive and laborious procedure is having a significant impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. However the alternative is starvation. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—a number from starvation, others drowning after falling into lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the art is a tribute to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm introducing the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

This artwork also underscores the sharp difference between the western view of electricity as a asset to be utilized for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an innate power in creatures, humans, and land. Tate Modern's history as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by regional governments. While attempting to be standard bearers for renewable energy, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the development of windfarms, river barriers, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi contend their legal protections, ways of life, and way of life are threatened. "It's challenging being such a limited population to stand your ground when the justifications are grounded in global sustainability," Sara comments. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the discourse of environmentalism, but yet it's just striving to find better ways to maintain patterns of use."

Family Conflicts

The artist and her kin have themselves conflicted with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter rules on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's sibling undertook a series of unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara developed a four-year series of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge screen of 400 reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the lobby.

Art as Activism

Among the community, art appears the only sphere in which they can be understood by outsiders. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|