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Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an artificial sun, descended down helter skelters, and witnessed robotic jellyfish drifting through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this huge space—designed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a winding design based on the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nasal airways. Once inside, they can meander around or chill out on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to tribal seniors sharing tales and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

Why choose the nasal structure? It may seem whimsical, but the exhibit celebrates a obscure natural marvel: scientists have discovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it breathes in by 80 degrees celsius, allowing the creature to survive in extreme Arctic conditions. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "generates a feeling of insignificance that you as a human being are not in control over nature." She is a ex- journalist, young adult author, and land defender, who comes from a herding family in northern Norway. "Maybe that fosters the chance to shift your outlook or trigger some humility," she continues.

A Tribute to Traditional Ways

The winding installation is part of a elements in Sara's absorbing art project showcasing the heritage, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They have faced persecution, cultural suppression, and eradication of their dialect by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the work also highlights the community's issues connected to the global warming, property rights, and external control.

Metaphor in Components

On the extended entry slope, there's a looming, 26-meter sculpture of pelts entangled by power and light cables. It can be read as a analogy for the political and economic systems restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this part of the exhibit, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, whereby solid layers of ice form as changing conditions melt and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' main winter sustenance, fungus. This phenomenon is a outcome of climate change, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Polar region than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in a remote town during a icy season and joined Sámi reindeer keepers on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they transported trailers of food pellets on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to distribute through labor. The reindeer crowded round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain for vegetative pieces. This resource-intensive and demanding method is having a drastic effect on herding practices—and on the animals' natural survival. But the choice is starvation. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—a number from starvation, others suffocating after plunging into water bodies through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the work is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

The installation also highlights the clear difference between the western view of electricity as a commodity to be utilized for profit and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of energy as an innate power in creatures, individuals, and land. Tate Modern's history as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be leaders for sustainable power, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and mines on their traditional territory; the Sámi argue their human rights, ways of life, and way of life are at risk. "It's hard being such a tiny group to protect your rights when the reasons are based on global sustainability," Sara notes. "Extractivism has co-opted the rhetoric of ecology, but still it's just aiming to find alternative ways to continue habits of expenditure."

Family Conflicts

The artist and her kin have themselves conflicted with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter policies on herding. Previously, Sara's sibling embarked on a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful court actions over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara produced a four-year set of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge curtain of 400 reindeer skulls, which was shown at the 2017 event Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it hangs in the entrance.

Art as Awareness

For many Sámi, creative work is 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|