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Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to unexpected displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have basked under an simulated sun, glided down helter skelters, and witnessed AI-powered jellyfish hovering through the air. Yet this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the detailed nasal chambers of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this cavernous space—created by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a labyrinthine construction based on the expanded inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Upon entering, they can wander around or relax on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to tribal seniors sharing stories and insights.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It may appear quirky, but the exhibit honors a obscure natural marvel: experts have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the ambient air it inhales by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the animal to endure in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "produces a feeling of insignificance that you as a person are not in control over nature." She is a former journalist, children's author, and rights advocate, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that generates the chance to shift your perspective or trigger some humility," she continues.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The winding installation is one of several features in Sara's immersive commission showcasing the heritage, science, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total about 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They have experienced discrimination, integration policies, and repression of their tongue by all four nations. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the installation also highlights the people's challenges relating to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Materials

At the long entry slope, there's a looming, 26-metre sculpture of reindeer hides ensnared by power and light cables. It represents a metaphor for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this part of the installation, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein thick coatings of ice form as varying conditions thaw and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' primary winter nourishment, lichen. Goavvi is a result of planetary warming, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Polar region than in other regions.

Previously, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they transported carts of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured tundra to provide through labor. These animals surrounded round us, scratching the frozen ground in vain for lichen-covered morsels. This expensive and demanding process is having a drastic effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. However the choice is death. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—a number from starvation, others suffocating after plunging into water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the installation is a tribute to them. "With the layering of materials, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Perspectives

The sculpture also emphasizes the clear divergence between the modern understanding of energy as a asset to be utilized for gain and existence and the Sámi outlook of life force as an natural essence in creatures, humans, and nature. The gallery's legacy as a fossil fuel plant is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by regional governments. While attempting to be leaders for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have clashed with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, river barriers, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their human rights, livelihoods, and traditions are at risk. "It's challenging being such a small minority to stand your ground when the arguments are rooted in environmental protection," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but still it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to continue patterns of expenditure."

Individual Conflicts

She and her relatives have personally clashed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent regulations on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's brother embarked on a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the forced culling of his livestock, supposedly to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara produced a extended set of creations called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive screen of 400 reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the 2017's art exhibition Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the entrance.

Art as Awareness

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