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Visitors to Tate Modern are accustomed to surprising experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They've basked under an simulated sun, descended down spiral slides, and witnessed automated sea creatures floating through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nasal passages of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this immense space—developed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a labyrinthine structure inspired by the expanded interior of a reindeer's nasal passages. Upon entering, they can stroll around or relax on pelts, listening on earphones to tribal seniors imparting stories and insights.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It could sound whimsical, but the exhibit celebrates a rarely recognized natural marvel: researchers have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the ambient air it inhales by 80°C, enabling the animal to endure in harsh Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "creates a sense of inferiority that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." Sara is a ex- writer, writer for kids, and land defender, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Maybe that generates the potential to shift your perspective or evoke some humbleness," she adds.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The labyrinthine structure is among various components in Sara's immersive art project celebrating the traditions, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They have faced persecution, integration policies, and repression of their language by all four states. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the installation also highlights the community's issues connected to the climate crisis, property rights, and external control.

Meaning in Components

Along the long entrance incline, there's a soaring, 26-meter formation of skins trapped by power and light cables. It can be read as a metaphor for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this part of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, in which thick layers of ice develop as varying conditions melt and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' key cold-season food, lichen. This phenomenon is a result 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 met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they transported trailers of animal nutrition on to the exposed Arctic plains to distribute through labor. These animals gathered round us, digging the frozen ground in futility for lichen-covered morsels. This resource-intensive and demanding process is having a significant effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. Yet the alternative is starvation. As these icy periods become routine, reindeer are perishing—some from lack of food, others suffocating after plunging into lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the art is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

The installation also underscores the sharp difference between the modern interpretation of energy as a commodity to be harnessed for gain and survival and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an inherent power in creatures, people, and the environment. Tate Modern's past as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by Nordic countries. While attempting to be exemplars for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, river barriers, and mines on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their human rights, livelihoods, and culture are at risk. "It's hard being such a tiny group to stand your ground when the arguments are based on environmental protection," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has adopted the discourse of ecology, but yet it's just aiming to find alternative ways to persist in patterns of expenditure."

Individual Challenges

She and her kin have personally disagreed with the national administration over its ever-stricter regulations on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's brother initiated a sequence of finally failed legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara developed a extended collection of creations called Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal drape of 400 reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the the show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For many Sámi, creative work seems the only realm in which they can be understood by the global community. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|