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Attendees to Tate Modern are used to unexpected experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an man-made sun, slid down helter skelters, and observed robotic sea creatures hovering through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nose chambers of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this cavernous space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a winding construction inspired by the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Once inside, they can wander around or unwind on pelts, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors sharing narratives and wisdom.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It could seem quirky, but the artwork celebrates a rarely recognized biological feat: researchers have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the ambient air it breathes in by 80°C, enabling the creature to endure in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "produces a perception of inferiority that you as a person are not superior over nature." She is a former writer, children's author, and land defender, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that fosters the chance to change your outlook or spark some modesty," she continues.

A Celebration to Indigenous Heritage

The maze-like structure is part of a elements in Sara's engaging exhibition honoring the culture, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They have experienced oppression, forced assimilation, and eradication of their language by all four states. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi belief system and founding narrative, the art also highlights the community's challenges associated with the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and external control.

Metaphor in Elements

Along the extended access slope, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot formation of reindeer hides trapped by utility lines. It represents a metaphor for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this component of the installation, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, whereby thick layers of ice appear as varying temperatures thaw and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary cold-season sustenance, moss. This phenomenon is a result of climate change, which is occurring up to four times faster in the Arctic than globally.

Previously, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they hauled trailers of animal nutrition on to the exposed tundra to dispense by hand. The reindeer crowded round us, digging the icy ground in vain attempts for mossy bits. This costly and laborious procedure is having a significant influence on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the other option is malnutrition. As these icy periods become routine, reindeer are perishing—a number from lack of food, others suffocating after sinking in streams through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the installation is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

The installation also underscores the clear contrast between the industrial interpretation of power as a commodity to be harnessed for profit and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an innate essence in animals, individuals, and nature. This venue's past as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi consider eco-imperialism by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be standard bearers for sustainable power, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their human rights, ways of life, and traditions are at risk. "It's challenging being such a small minority to stand your ground when the justifications are based on saving the world," Sara observes. "Extractivism has adopted the language of environmentalism, but yet it's just striving to find more suitable ways to persist in habits of use."

Individual Struggles

She and her kin have personally clashed with the state authorities over its ever-stricter policies on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's sibling initiated a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful court actions over the forced culling of his animals, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara produced a extended series of creations called Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge drape of four hundred animal bones, which was exhibited at the 2017's art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the entryway.

Art as Activism

For many Sámi, art appears the sole sphere in which they can be listened to by outsiders. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|