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Guests to Tate Modern are accustomed to unexpected encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an man-made sun, slid down spiral slides, and observed robotic jellyfish drifting through the air. Yet this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the complex nose passages of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this cavernous space—created by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a labyrinthine construction based on the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nasal passages. Inside, they can stroll around or chill out on reindeer hides, tuning in on headphones to community leaders sharing stories and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It could sound playful, but the exhibit pays tribute to a rarely recognized biological feat: scientists have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it breathes in by eighty degrees, helping the animal to endure in extreme Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "creates a sense of smallness that you as a individual are not in control over nature." Sara is a former writer, children's author, and rights advocate, who is from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that generates the chance to shift your perspective or spark some humbleness," she continues.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The maze-like installation is among various features in Sara's absorbing commission honoring the heritage, understanding, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number roughly 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They've experienced persecution, forced assimilation, and eradication of their tongue by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the art also spotlights the group's challenges connected to the climate crisis, loss of territory, and external control.

Meaning in Components

At the extended access ramp, there's a soaring, 26-meter sculpture of skins ensnared by electrical wires. It can be read as a analogy for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this section of the exhibit, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an harsh environmental condition, wherein thick sheets of ice develop as fluctuating weather melt and ice over the snow, locking in the reindeers' main winter sustenance, moss. The condition is a consequence of climate change, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than in other regions.

Previously, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a icy season and went with Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they transported trailers of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to provide through labor. These animals surrounded round us, scratching the icy ground in vain for mossy morsels. This costly and laborious method is having a drastic influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. But the alternative is death. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are succumbing—some from starvation, others submerging after sinking in streams through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the art is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

The installation also emphasizes the clear divergence between the modern understanding of electricity as a commodity to be utilized for profit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of energy as an inherent life force in creatures, individuals, and the environment. Tate Modern's past as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by Nordic countries. As they strive to be exemplars for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, river barriers, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and traditions are threatened. "It's challenging being such a small minority to stand your ground when the arguments are rooted in saving the world," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has adopted the language of ecology, but still it's just striving to find better ways to persist in patterns of expenditure."

Individual Conflicts

Sara and her family have themselves disagreed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent policies on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's brother undertook a sequence of finally failed court actions over the required reduction of his herd, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a extended series of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge drape of numerous cranial remains, which was shown at the 2017 event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the national institution, where it resides in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

Among the community, visual expression appears the sole sphere in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|