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Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to unexpected displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They've basked under an simulated sun, slid down amusement rides, and observed AI-powered jellyfish hovering through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this immense space—developed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a labyrinthine design inspired by the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nasal airways. Inside, they can wander around or chill out on skins, listening on headphones to community leaders sharing tales and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It might appear quirky, but the exhibit pays tribute to a rarely recognized natural marvel: scientists have discovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it inhales by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the creature to thrive in harsh Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "creates a perception of inferiority that you as a person are not superior over nature." She is a former journalist, young adult author, and land defender, who is from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Possibly that fosters the possibility to alter your outlook or evoke some modesty," she adds.

An Homage to Indigenous Heritage

The winding design is part of a features in Sara's absorbing exhibition celebrating the culture, understanding, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count about 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They have endured discrimination, forced assimilation, and suppression of their language by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi belief system and founding narrative, the art also spotlights the people's challenges relating to the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and external control.

Meaning in Materials

On the extended entry ramp, there's a soaring, 26-metre sculpture of pelts entangled by utility lines. It can be read as a analogy for the societal frameworks 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, in which thick layers of ice develop as varying conditions thaw and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' main cold-season food, lichen. Goavvi is a result of planetary warming, which is taking place up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than globally.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and went with Sámi herders on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they hauled trailers of supplementary feed on to the exposed Arctic plains to distribute by hand. The reindeer gathered round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain attempts for vegetative morsels. This costly and demanding procedure is having a significant impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. But the other option is starvation. As goavvi winters become frequent, reindeer are perishing—a number from starvation, others suffocating after plunging into lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the work is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm introducing the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

The installation also underscores the stark divergence between the modern understanding of electricity as a commodity to be exploited for profit and existence and the Sámi worldview of energy as an innate power in creatures, people, and land. This venue's legacy as a fossil fuel plant is connected to this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by Nordic countries. As they strive to be exemplars for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the construction of windfarms, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi contend their human rights, ways of life, and way of life are threatened. "It's challenging being such a limited population to defend yourself when the arguments are based on saving the world," Sara comments. "Mining practices has adopted the language of ecology, but yet it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to maintain patterns of consumption."

Family Challenges

The artist and her family have themselves conflicted with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter regulations on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's sibling undertook a sequence of unsuccessful lawsuits over the forced culling of his livestock, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara produced a four-year collection of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive curtain of four hundred animal bones, which was exhibited at the 2017's art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Awareness

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