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Attendees to Tate Modern are accustomed to surprising encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an artificial sun, slid down helter skelters, and witnessed AI-powered jellyfish drifting through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nose passages of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this immense space—created by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes patrons into a maze-like design inspired by the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Inside, they can wander around or unwind on reindeer hides, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors imparting narratives and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It could sound whimsical, but the exhibit pays tribute to a little-known scientific wonder: scientists have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it breathes in by eighty degrees, helping the animal to survive in extreme Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "produces a perception of smallness that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." She is a ex- writer, children's author, and rights advocate, who comes from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that generates the potential to change your outlook or spark some humbleness," she continues.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The winding structure is one of several components in Sara's absorbing art project showcasing the traditions, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They have faced discrimination, cultural suppression, and suppression of their tongue by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the installation also draws attention to the people's struggles relating to the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Meaning in Elements

On the long access ramp, there's a looming, 26-metre formation of reindeer hides trapped by electrical wires. It represents a metaphor for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this component of the artwork, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, in which thick sheets of ice develop as varying weather melt and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' key cold-season food, lichen. This phenomenon is a consequence of global heating, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than elsewhere.

Previously, I met with Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and joined Sámi herders on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they hauled containers of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured tundra to dispense through labor. The herd crowded round us, scratching the icy ground in vain attempts for vegetative bits. This expensive and demanding process is having a severe influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the alternative is starvation. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—some from starvation, others drowning after falling into lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. In a sense, the work is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of elements, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Perspectives

This artwork also emphasizes the sharp contrast between the industrial view of energy as a resource to be exploited for profit and existence and the Sámi outlook of energy as an natural life force in animals, humans, and land. Tate Modern's legacy as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider eco-imperialism by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be leaders for clean sources, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, water power facilities, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and culture are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to stand your ground when the justifications are grounded in saving the world," Sara observes. "Mining practices has appropriated the discourse of sustainability, but still it's just striving to find alternative ways to persist in patterns of expenditure."

Individual Struggles

The artist and her relatives have personally disagreed with the Norwegian government over its tightening rules on herding. In 2016, Sara's sibling undertook a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the required reduction of his animals, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara developed a multi-year series of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi including a massive screen of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the 2017 event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it hangs in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Awareness

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