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Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to unexpected displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an artificial sun, descended down spiral slides, and observed robotic sea creatures hovering through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be immersing themselves in the complex nasal cavities of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this cavernous space—created by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a labyrinthine design modeled after the expanded interior of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Upon entering, they can meander around or relax on reindeer hides, tuning in on earphones to Sámi elders imparting narratives and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It might appear whimsical, but the exhibit pays tribute to a rarely recognized biological feat: scientists have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it takes in by eighty degrees, allowing the creature to endure in extreme Arctic conditions. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "produces a feeling of insignificance that you as a person are not in control over nature." She is a ex- writer, children's author, and environmental activist, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Maybe that fosters the chance to shift your viewpoint or evoke some modesty," she adds.

A Tribute to Indigenous Heritage

The labyrinthine installation is one of several elements in Sara's absorbing art project celebrating the traditions, science, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number about 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They've endured persecution, integration policies, and eradication of their language by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi mythology and origin tale, the art also spotlights the group's challenges relating to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Components

Along the lengthy entrance ramp, there's a towering, 26-metre sculpture of reindeer hides trapped by utility lines. It serves as a metaphor for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this section of the installation, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, whereby thick sheets of ice appear as varying temperatures liquefy and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' key winter sustenance, fungus. This phenomenon is a result of planetary warming, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Polar region than elsewhere.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in the Norwegian far north during a icy season and joined Sámi reindeer keepers on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they transported carts of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to provide by hand. The reindeer surrounded round us, digging the icy ground in futility for lichen-covered bits. This expensive and labour-intensive method is having a drastic impact on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the choice is death. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are dying—some from lack of food, others submerging after falling into water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the art is a monument to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

This artwork also highlights the clear contrast between the modern interpretation of power as a resource to be exploited for profit and existence and the Sámi outlook of life force as an innate life force in animals, humans, and land. The gallery's legacy as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by Nordic countries. In their efforts to be standard bearers for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, river barriers, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and traditions are threatened. "It's hard being such a small minority to protect your rights when the reasons are grounded in global sustainability," Sara comments. "Mining practices has co-opted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just striving to find more suitable ways to maintain habits of expenditure."

Personal Challenges

She and her kin have personally conflicted with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent regulations on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's sibling initiated a series of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the forced culling of his animals, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a extended set of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi including a massive drape of numerous cranial remains, which was exhibited at the the show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work is the only sphere in which they can be listened to by the global community. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|