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Visitors to Tate Modern are used to unexpected displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an artificial sun, slid down amusement rides, and witnessed AI-powered jellyfish floating through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nose cavities of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this immense space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a maze-like design modeled after the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Inside, they can stroll around or relax on skins, tuning in on headphones to community leaders sharing tales and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It may appear whimsical, but the installation honors a rarely recognized scientific wonder: researchers have discovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the ambient air it takes in by eighty degrees, allowing the animal to survive in extreme Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "generates a sense of smallness that you as a person are not superior over nature." Sara is a ex- journalist, children's author, and rights advocate, who is from a pastoral family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that fosters the potential to alter your viewpoint or evoke some humbleness," she adds.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The winding installation is one of several features in Sara's engaging commission celebrating the heritage, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Partially migratory, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They've faced persecution, cultural suppression, and suppression of their language by all four nations. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the work also spotlights the people's challenges relating to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and external control.

Metaphor in Materials

Along the lengthy entrance slope, there's a soaring, 26-metre sculpture of pelts entangled by electrical wires. It represents a symbol for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this part of the exhibit, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, whereby thick coatings of ice develop as varying temperatures melt and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' key cold-season nourishment, moss. The condition is a outcome of planetary warming, which is occurring up to four times faster in the Polar region than elsewhere.

Previously, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they transported carts of food pellets on to the barren Arctic plains to provide by hand. The reindeer crowded round us, scratching the frozen ground in futility for vegetative bits. This expensive and labour-intensive procedure is having a significant effect on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. But the choice is starvation. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are dying—some from lack of food, others submerging after plunging into lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the work is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Perspectives

The sculpture also underscores the clear contrast between the industrial understanding of power as a asset to be utilized for gain and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an innate essence in creatures, humans, and the environment. The gallery's history as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi consider environmental exploitation by Nordic countries. While attempting to be standard bearers for clean sources, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the development of windfarms, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi contend their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and way of life are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to protect your rights when the arguments are grounded in global sustainability," Sara notes. "Mining practices has appropriated the language of sustainability, but nonetheless it's just striving to find better ways to maintain practices of consumption."

Individual Challenges

Sara and her relatives have personally conflicted with the national administration over its ever-stricter rules on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's sibling embarked on a series of finally failed lawsuits over the required reduction of his herd, apparently to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara developed a multi-year series of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal screen of 400 animal bones, which was displayed at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it is displayed in the entryway.

The Role of Art in Awareness

Among the community, visual expression is the only realm in which they can be listened to by outsiders. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|