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Guests to Tate Modern are accustomed to unexpected encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have basked under an artificial sun, glided down amusement rides, and witnessed automated jellyfish floating through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the complex nose chambers of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a maze-like design based on the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Once inside, they can meander around or unwind on reindeer hides, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors imparting tales and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It could appear playful, but the installation pays tribute to a little-known natural marvel: researchers have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it inhales by 80 degrees celsius, allowing the animal to survive in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "creates a feeling of inferiority that you as a person are not dominant over nature." The artist is a ex- writer, young adult author, and rights advocate, who comes from a pastoral family in northern Norway. "Maybe that generates the potential to change your perspective or trigger some humility," she continues.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The maze-like design is part of a features in Sara's engaging art project showcasing the culture, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number about 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They've endured oppression, forced assimilation, and repression of their dialect by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the art also highlights the group's issues connected to the global warming, land dispossession, and external control.

Meaning in Components

On the lengthy entry slope, there's a towering, 26-metre sculpture of reindeer hides entangled by electrical wires. It can be read as a metaphor for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part heavenly staircase, this part of the exhibit, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, whereby thick coatings of ice develop as varying weather melt and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' key cold-season food, lichen. Goavvi is a outcome of planetary warming, which is taking place up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than in other regions.

A few years back, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and joined Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they hauled trailers of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured tundra to distribute by hand. The herd crowded round us, pawing the frozen ground in vain attempts for mossy morsels. This costly and labour-intensive procedure is having a drastic effect on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. However the other option is malnutrition. As these icy periods become frequent, reindeer are perishing—some from hunger, others suffocating after falling into streams through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the installation is a monument to them. "With the layering of materials, in a way I'm introducing the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

This artwork also underscores the clear contrast between the modern interpretation of energy as a commodity to be harnessed for profit and existence and the Sámi worldview of energy as an natural essence in animals, people, and the environment. The gallery's past as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by regional governments. In their efforts to be leaders for clean sources, Nordic nations have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi assert their human rights, ways of life, and culture are threatened. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to stand your ground when the arguments are grounded in environmental protection," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the discourse of sustainability, but nonetheless it's just striving to find better ways to persist in habits of consumption."

Family Challenges

Sara and her kin have themselves disagreed with the national administration over its ever-stricter rules on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's brother initiated a set of finally failed court actions over the required reduction of his animals, apparently to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a multi-year series of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge screen of numerous cranial remains, which was exhibited at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later purchased by the national institution, where it is displayed in the entryway.

The Role of Art in Advocacy

For many Sámi, visual expression seems the sole realm in which they can be understood by people of other nations. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|