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Guests to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have basked under an man-made sun, glided down amusement rides, and observed AI-powered jellyfish floating through the air. Yet this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the detailed nasal chambers of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this huge space—created by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a labyrinthine design modeled after the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Inside, they can wander around or chill out on skins, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors imparting narratives and insights.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why choose the nasal structure? It might appear whimsical, but the installation honors a obscure biological feat: scientists have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the surrounding air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the animal to endure in extreme Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "generates a sense of smallness that you as a individual are not in control over nature." Sara is a former reporter, young adult author, and environmental activist, who is from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that fosters the chance to alter your outlook or trigger some humbleness," she states.

An Homage to Indigenous Heritage

The labyrinthine installation is one of several components in Sara's immersive commission celebrating the culture, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They've experienced oppression, forced assimilation, and repression of their tongue by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the art also highlights the community's challenges relating to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Elements

On the long access slope, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot formation of reindeer hides entangled by power and light cables. It serves as a analogy for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this component of the exhibit, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an harsh environmental condition, whereby solid sheets of ice appear as changing temperatures liquefy and ice over the snow, locking in the reindeers' key winter nourishment, lichen. Goavvi is a result of climate change, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Far North than in other regions.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in a remote town during a icy season and went with Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they transported containers of supplementary feed on to the exposed tundra to provide manually. These animals surrounded round us, scratching the slippery ground in futility for vegetative bits. This expensive and laborious procedure is having a severe influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. But the alternative is death. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—a number from starvation, others submerging after sinking in streams through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the art is a monument to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

This artwork also emphasizes the stark divergence between the modern view of electricity as a commodity to be harnessed for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of energy as an innate power in creatures, people, and nature. Tate Modern's history as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be standard bearers for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of windfarms, river barriers, and mines on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their legal protections, ways of life, and traditions are endangered. "It's hard being such a small minority to stand your ground when the justifications are grounded in environmental protection," Sara comments. "Extractivism has co-opted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but yet it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to persist in habits of use."

Family Challenges

She and her kin have themselves conflicted with the Norwegian government over its tightening rules on herding. Previously, Sara's sibling undertook a set of unsuccessful court actions over the required reduction of his animals, apparently to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a four-year series of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi including a huge screen of 400 cranial remains, which was shown at the 2017 event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the national institution, where it is displayed in the entryway.

The Role of Art in Advocacy

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