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Visitors to Tate Modern are accustomed to unusual encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They've basked under an man-made sun, glided down helter skelters, and witnessed AI-powered sea creatures hovering through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nose chambers of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this cavernous space—designed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a labyrinthine design based on the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose cavities. Once inside, they can wander around or relax on pelts, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors sharing narratives and wisdom.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It could appear playful, but the artwork pays tribute to a obscure scientific wonder: experts have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it breathes in by 80°C, helping the creature to survive in inhospitable Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "creates a feeling of insignificance that you as a individual are not superior over nature." The artist is a former reporter, young adult author, and environmental activist, who is from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Maybe that fosters the potential to shift your outlook or spark some modesty," she continues.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The winding installation is part of a features in Sara's engaging exhibition honoring the heritage, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They have faced oppression, forced assimilation, and suppression of their dialect by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi mythology and origin tale, the art also spotlights the group's challenges associated with the climate crisis, property rights, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Elements

Along the extended access ramp, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot formation of pelts trapped by electrical wires. It can be read as a metaphor for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part heavenly staircase, this section of the artwork, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an severe climatic event, wherein thick sheets of ice develop as changing conditions melt and ice over the snow, locking in the reindeers' main winter sustenance, moss. The condition is a outcome of climate change, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi herders on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they transported containers of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured tundra to distribute by hand. These animals surrounded round us, pawing the icy ground in vain attempts for vegetative pieces. This costly and demanding process is having a severe influence on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. But the other option is malnutrition. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—a number from starvation, others suffocating after plunging into streams through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the art is a memorial to them. "With the layering of elements, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

The sculpture also underscores the sharp divergence between the western view of electricity as a asset to be exploited for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an innate power in creatures, individuals, and nature. This venue's past as a fossil fuel plant is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as eco-imperialism by Nordic countries. While attempting to be leaders for sustainable power, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, water power facilities, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and way of life are endangered. "It's hard being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the justifications are grounded in saving the world," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the discourse of environmentalism, but yet it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to persist in practices of consumption."

Family Struggles

The artist and her family have themselves disagreed with the national administration over its ever-stricter rules on herding. A few years ago, Sara's sibling embarked on a set of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the required reduction of his herd, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara produced a extended set of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge curtain of 400 reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the entrance.

The Role of Art in Advocacy

For many Sámi, creative work appears the sole domain in which they can be heard by people of other nations. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|