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Guests to Tate Modern are used to surprising experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an simulated sun, slid down spiral slides, and witnessed automated sea creatures floating through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nose chambers of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this huge space—developed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a labyrinthine construction inspired by the expanded inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Inside, they can stroll around or relax on reindeer hides, tuning in on earphones to Sámi elders telling tales and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It might appear quirky, but the installation celebrates a rarely recognized natural marvel: researchers have discovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it breathes in by eighty degrees, enabling the animal to endure in extreme Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "produces a sense of smallness that you as a person are not superior over nature." Sara is a ex- writer, writer for kids, and land defender, who comes from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that creates the potential to change your outlook or spark some modesty," she adds.

A Tribute to Traditional Ways

The maze-like structure is one of several elements in Sara's absorbing art project celebrating the culture, science, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi count about 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They've faced oppression, cultural suppression, and suppression of their language by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the installation also spotlights the people's issues relating to the global warming, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Components

At the extended entry slope, there's a looming, 26-meter formation of skins entangled by power and light cables. It can be read as a analogy for the societal frameworks restricting the Sámi. Part pylon, part heavenly staircase, this section of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby dense sheets of ice form as fluctuating weather thaw and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' key cold-season sustenance, moss. The condition is a consequence of planetary warming, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than in other regions.

Three years ago, I met with Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they carried containers of food pellets on to the barren tundra to dispense by hand. The reindeer crowded round us, digging the slippery ground in vain attempts for lichen-covered morsels. This expensive and demanding procedure is having a severe influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the alternative is starvation. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are dying—some from starvation, others submerging after sinking in lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the installation is a monument to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

The sculpture also emphasizes the clear contrast between the modern interpretation of power as a commodity to be utilized for profit and existence and the Sámi outlook of energy as an natural essence in creatures, humans, and nature. Tate Modern's past as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be exemplars for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, water power facilities, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and way of life are at risk. "It's challenging being such a small minority to stand your ground when the arguments are based on environmental protection," Sara comments. "Extractivism has adopted the rhetoric of sustainability, but nonetheless it's just attempting to find alternative ways to persist in practices of use."

Individual Challenges

The artist and her family have themselves disagreed with the national administration over its ever-stricter policies on herding. A few years ago, Sara's brother embarked on a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, apparently to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a multi-year collection of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a colossal curtain of numerous reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it is displayed in the entryway.

The Role of Art in Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, art seems the sole sphere in which they can be understood by the global community. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|