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Guests to Tate Modern are accustomed to surprising encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've basked under an man-made sun, slid down spiral slides, and seen automated jellyfish hovering through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nasal chambers of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this cavernous space—developed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a winding design based on the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nasal airways. Once inside, they can stroll around or chill out on skins, tuning in on earphones to community leaders imparting tales and knowledge.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It may seem playful, but the artwork pays tribute to a rarely recognized biological feat: researchers have discovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the surrounding air it takes in by eighty degrees, allowing the creature to endure in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "produces a feeling of smallness that you as a human being are not superior over nature." Sara is a ex- reporter, writer for kids, and environmental activist, who is from a herding family in northern Norway. "Maybe that creates the chance to alter your perspective or trigger some humbleness," she adds.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The maze-like installation is among various features in Sara's engaging exhibition showcasing the culture, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number about 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They have endured oppression, forced assimilation, and repression of their language by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi belief system and founding narrative, the work also spotlights the community's struggles connected to the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Elements

Along the lengthy entry slope, there's a looming, 26-meter structure of pelts trapped by electrical wires. It serves as a analogy for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part heavenly staircase, this section of the installation, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby dense sheets of ice form as varying conditions liquefy and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' main winter food, lichen. The condition is a result of global heating, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Far North than elsewhere.

A few years back, I met with Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and joined Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they transported containers of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to provide manually. The reindeer gathered round us, scratching the slippery ground in futility for lichen-covered pieces. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive method is having a significant influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the other option is malnutrition. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are succumbing—a number from lack of food, others suffocating after falling into water bodies through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the art is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of elements, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

The installation also highlights the clear divergence between the western understanding of electricity as a commodity to be utilized for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an natural essence in animals, humans, and land. The gallery's history as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by Nordic countries. While attempting to be standard bearers for renewable energy, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the development of windfarms, water power facilities, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their legal protections, ways of life, and way of life are endangered. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to protect your rights when the reasons are grounded in global sustainability," Sara observes. "Mining practices has co-opted the rhetoric of sustainability, but yet it's just striving to find better ways to persist in practices of use."

Individual Challenges

She and her family have themselves disagreed with the national administration over its tightening regulations on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's brother undertook a series of finally failed legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara developed a multi-year collection of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge drape of four hundred animal bones, which was displayed at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it is displayed in the entrance.

The Role of Art in Activism

Among the community, creative work is the only realm in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|