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Guests to Tate Modern are familiar to surprising displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have basked under an simulated sun, glided down spiral slides, and seen automated sea creatures floating through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nasal chambers of a reindeer. The current artist commission for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a maze-like structure inspired by the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Upon entering, they can meander around or unwind on pelts, listening on earphones to tribal seniors sharing tales and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It may sound playful, but the exhibit honors a obscure natural marvel: scientists have discovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it inhales by 80 degrees celsius, helping the creature to endure in inhospitable Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara explains, "generates a perception of inferiority that you as a human being are not superior over nature." She is a former writer, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that fosters the chance to shift your viewpoint or trigger some humility," she states.

An Homage to Indigenous Heritage

The maze-like installation is among various components in Sara's immersive exhibition celebrating the heritage, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They've endured discrimination, forced assimilation, and suppression of their language by all four nations. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the work also highlights the group's struggles relating to the global warming, loss of territory, and colonialism.

Meaning in Components

At the extended entry ramp, there's a soaring, 26-meter sculpture of skins trapped by electrical wires. It serves as a analogy for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Part pylon, part heavenly staircase, this section of the exhibit, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which thick layers of ice develop as varying temperatures melt and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary winter sustenance, moss. This phenomenon is a result of planetary warming, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than elsewhere.

A few years back, I met with Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and went with Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in freezing temperatures as they carried trailers of supplementary feed on to the exposed frozen landscape to distribute manually. The herd surrounded round us, scratching the frozen ground in futility for lichen-covered morsels. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive method is having a drastic influence on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the alternative is malnutrition. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are dying—a number from hunger, others drowning after plunging into streams through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the art is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of elements, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

The sculpture also underscores the stark divergence between the modern understanding of energy as a resource to be harnessed for gain and survival and the Sámi outlook of life force as an natural power in animals, individuals, and nature. The gallery's legacy as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as eco-imperialism by Nordic countries. While attempting to be exemplars for clean sources, these states have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, water power facilities, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi argue their legal protections, livelihoods, and way of life are at risk. "It's challenging being such a limited population to stand your ground when the justifications are rooted in environmental protection," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the rhetoric of ecology, but still it's just aiming to find alternative ways to maintain practices of use."

Family Challenges

She and her kin have personally clashed with the national administration over its tightening policies on animal husbandry. Previously, Sara's sibling embarked on a series of finally failed court actions over the required reduction of his herd, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a extended collection of creations called Pile O'Sápmi including a massive screen of 400 reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the entrance.

Art as Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, art is the only sphere in which they can be heard by outsiders. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|