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Visitors to Tate Modern are accustomed to unusual encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They've basked under an simulated sun, slid down spiral slides, and witnessed robotic jellyfish floating through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nasal passages of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this immense space—created by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a maze-like structure based on the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Upon entering, they can meander around or chill out on skins, tuning in on earphones to community leaders imparting tales and insights.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It may seem quirky, but the installation celebrates a obscure scientific wonder: 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, allowing the creature to endure in harsh Arctic conditions. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "produces a sense of smallness that you as a person are not dominant over nature." Sara is a former reporter, young adult author, and environmental activist, who is from a herding family in northern Norway. "Maybe that creates the potential to shift your viewpoint or evoke some humility," she adds.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The maze-like design is part of a components in Sara's engaging art project celebrating the traditions, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi total about 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They've endured oppression, integration policies, and repression of their dialect by all four states. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the art also highlights the group's challenges associated with the global warming, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Components

At the long entrance ramp, there's a looming, 26-meter sculpture of pelts ensnared by power and light cables. It can be read as a symbol for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this section of the installation, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby dense layers of ice appear as varying conditions melt and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' key cold-season nourishment, fungus. This phenomenon is a outcome of climate change, which is happening up to four times faster in the Far North than globally.

A few years back, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi herders on their motorized sleds in freezing temperatures as they transported containers of food pellets on to the exposed tundra to provide by hand. These animals surrounded round us, scratching the frozen ground in vain attempts for lichen-covered bits. This costly and labour-intensive process is having a severe effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. Yet the choice is malnutrition. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are succumbing—a number from starvation, others drowning after falling into water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. In a sense, the work is a monument to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm introducing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

This artwork also emphasizes the stark contrast between the industrial understanding of power as a commodity to be utilized for gain and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an natural essence in animals, individuals, and the environment. This venue's history as a coal and oil power station is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as eco-imperialism by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be standard bearers for clean sources, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, water power facilities, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their human rights, incomes, and culture are endangered. "It's hard being such a limited population to defend yourself when the reasons are based on global sustainability," Sara observes. "Extractivism has co-opted the language of sustainability, but still it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to persist in practices of consumption."

Personal Challenges

She and her family have personally disagreed with the state authorities over its ever-stricter regulations on herding. A few years ago, Sara's sibling undertook a set of unsuccessful court actions over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, supposedly to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara produced a four-year series of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive curtain of 400 cranial remains, which was exhibited at the the event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the entrance.

Art as Advocacy

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