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Guests to Tate Modern are accustomed to surprising experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an simulated sun, descended down helter skelters, and witnessed automated jellyfish hovering through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nose chambers of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this huge space—created by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a maze-like structure based on the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Inside, they can wander around or chill out on skins, listening on headphones to community leaders imparting stories and insights.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It may seem quirky, 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 raise the temperature of the ambient air it breathes in by 80 degrees celsius, allowing the creature to endure in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "creates a feeling of inferiority that you as a human being are not superior over nature." Sara is a former journalist, children's author, and rights advocate, who comes from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that fosters the chance to alter your outlook or trigger some humbleness," she states.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The winding structure is among various elements in Sara's immersive exhibition celebrating the culture, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Partially migratory, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They've faced persecution, cultural suppression, and suppression of their tongue by all four states. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the art also draws attention to the people's issues connected to the climate crisis, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Meaning in Components

Along the long access incline, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot formation of pelts trapped by power and light cables. It represents a analogy for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part heavenly staircase, this component of the exhibit, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, in which thick coatings of ice form as varying conditions thaw and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' key winter sustenance, lichen. This phenomenon is a outcome of climate change, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than in other regions.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and went with Sámi reindeer keepers on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they transported containers of supplementary feed on to the barren tundra to dispense manually. The reindeer gathered round us, digging the slippery ground in vain for lichen-covered morsels. This expensive and laborious process is having a significant effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. But the alternative is starvation. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are succumbing—a number from hunger, others suffocating after sinking in streams through prematurely melting ice. To some extent, the installation is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm introducing the condition to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

This artwork also highlights the stark divergence between the industrial interpretation of electricity as a commodity to be utilized for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an natural power in creatures, humans, and nature. This venue's history as a coal and oil power station is connected to this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be exemplars for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of windfarms, river barriers, and extraction sites on their traditional territory; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and traditions are at risk. "It's very difficult being such a tiny group to stand your ground when the reasons are based on saving the world," Sara notes. "Extractivism has appropriated the discourse of ecology, but still it's just striving to find more suitable ways to maintain patterns of expenditure."

Family Struggles

Sara and her relatives have personally conflicted with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent rules on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's sibling initiated a series of unsuccessful court actions over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara developed a four-year collection of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal screen of 400 cranial remains, which was shown at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later purchased by the public gallery, where it hangs in the lobby.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

For numerous Indigenous people, visual expression appears the exclusive sphere in which they can be understood by people of other nations. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|