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Attendees to Tate Modern are accustomed to unusual experiences in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an artificial sun, descended down spiral slides, and observed automated sea creatures hovering through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nose passages of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this cavernous space—created by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a labyrinthine design based on the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Once inside, they can meander around or unwind on pelts, listening on headphones to community leaders telling stories and wisdom.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It might appear whimsical, but the installation celebrates a little-known scientific wonder: scientists have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it breathes in by 80°C, helping the creature to endure in inhospitable Arctic climates. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "generates a sense of inferiority that you as a person are not superior over nature." She is a ex- reporter, writer for kids, and land defender, who is from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that fosters the possibility to change your outlook or evoke some humbleness," she continues.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The winding installation is part of a elements in Sara's absorbing art project celebrating the traditions, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They have endured discrimination, cultural suppression, and suppression of their tongue by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the art also highlights the group's challenges connected to the environmental emergency, property rights, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Components

At the extended access incline, there's a towering, 26-meter sculpture of skins trapped by utility lines. It represents a symbol for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this part of the installation, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, whereby dense sheets of ice appear as changing temperatures thaw and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' key winter nourishment, moss. Goavvi is a result of climate change, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they carried carts of food pellets on to the exposed frozen landscape to dispense by hand. The herd gathered round us, pawing the icy ground in vain attempts for vegetative bits. This expensive and demanding method is having a significant impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. But the other option is malnutrition. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are perishing—a number from hunger, others suffocating after falling into streams through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the installation is a memorial to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

This artwork also emphasizes the stark difference between the modern interpretation of energy as a asset to be exploited for gain and existence and the Sámi outlook of life force as an natural essence in animals, individuals, and nature. Tate Modern's legacy as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be standard bearers for renewable energy, Nordic nations have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, livelihoods, and culture are at risk. "It's hard being such a limited population to protect your rights when the arguments are rooted in environmental protection," Sara comments. "Resource exploitation has adopted the discourse of environmentalism, but still it's just attempting to find better ways to continue habits of use."

Family Struggles

Sara and her relatives have themselves conflicted with the state authorities over its tightening regulations on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's sibling initiated a set of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara created a four-year series of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge curtain of four hundred cranial remains, which was shown at the the show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it resides in the entrance.

Art as Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, visual expression is the only sphere in which they can be understood by people of other nations. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|