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Visitors to Tate Modern are used to unusual experiences in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've basked under an man-made sun, slid down helter skelters, and observed robotic sea creatures hovering through the air. However this marks the first time they will be venturing themselves in the complex nasal cavities of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this cavernous space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a maze-like structure modeled after the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nasal airways. Once inside, they can meander around or unwind on reindeer hides, tuning in on earphones to Sámi elders sharing narratives and insights.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why the nose? It may sound whimsical, but the artwork celebrates a rarely recognized natural marvel: scientists have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it inhales by 80 degrees celsius, helping the creature to endure in harsh Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "generates a sense of inferiority that you as a person are not superior over nature." She is a former journalist, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who hails from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that fosters the possibility to shift your outlook or evoke some modesty," she continues.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The maze-like installation is one of several components in Sara's engaging art project honoring the traditions, understanding, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They've endured discrimination, integration policies, and eradication of their language by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the art also highlights the people's challenges relating to the climate crisis, loss of territory, and colonialism.

Meaning in Components

Along the extended access incline, there's a towering, eighty-five-foot sculpture of skins ensnared by utility lines. It represents a analogy for the societal frameworks constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part heavenly staircase, this component of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, wherein dense coatings of ice appear as fluctuating conditions melt and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' key cold-season food, moss. Goavvi is a outcome of planetary warming, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than elsewhere.

A few years back, I visited Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they carried carts of food pellets on to the wind-scoured tundra to dispense manually. The herd crowded round us, scratching the frozen ground in vain for vegetative bits. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive process is having a significant influence on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. Yet the choice is death. As these icy periods become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—a number from lack of food, others suffocating after plunging into water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the art is a tribute to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

The sculpture also emphasizes the stark difference between the western view of power as a asset to be exploited for gain and survival and the Sámi outlook of energy as an natural essence in animals, individuals, and the environment. Tate Modern's legacy as a fossil fuel plant is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as eco-imperialism by regional governments. In their efforts to be leaders for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have clashed with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, water power facilities, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, livelihoods, and way of life are endangered. "It's challenging being such a small minority to protect your rights when the arguments are rooted in saving the world," Sara comments. "Mining practices has appropriated the language of sustainability, but yet it's just aiming to find alternative ways to maintain patterns of expenditure."

Personal Challenges

She and her kin have themselves conflicted with the Norwegian government over its tightening regulations on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's brother undertook a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the required reduction of his livestock, apparently to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara created a extended series of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal screen of numerous animal bones, which was exhibited at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Activism

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