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Attendees to Tate Modern are familiar to unexpected displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an man-made sun, descended down helter skelters, and seen robotic sea creatures floating through the air. Yet this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nasal chambers of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a maze-like design based on the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Inside, they can stroll around or chill out on pelts, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors imparting stories and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It may appear quirky, but the installation celebrates a rarely recognized scientific wonder: experts have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the surrounding air it breathes in by eighty degrees, enabling the creature to endure in extreme Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "generates a sense of insignificance that you as a individual are not in control over nature." Sara is a ex- writer, children's author, and land defender, who hails from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that generates the possibility to change your outlook or evoke some modesty," she adds.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The labyrinthine design is part of a elements in Sara's absorbing art project honoring the culture, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Partially migratory, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They've experienced oppression, forced assimilation, and eradication of their language by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the work also spotlights the group's challenges relating to the environmental emergency, property rights, and imperialism.

Meaning in Materials

Along the extended entrance slope, there's a looming, 26-meter formation of skins entangled by power and light cables. It can be read as a symbol for the political and economic systems restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this section of the artwork, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein thick coatings of ice develop as changing conditions thaw and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary cold-season nourishment, fungus. This phenomenon is a consequence of planetary warming, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than in other regions.

Previously, I met with Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and accompanied Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they carried trailers of supplementary feed on to the exposed frozen landscape to dispense through labor. The herd crowded round us, pawing the frozen ground in vain for vegetative morsels. This costly and demanding process is having a drastic influence on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. But the choice is death. As these icy periods become routine, reindeer are succumbing—a number from hunger, others drowning after sinking in streams through unstable frozen surfaces. In a sense, the work is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

The installation also emphasizes the sharp difference between the western view of electricity as a asset to be exploited for gain and existence and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an innate life force in creatures, people, and land. The gallery's past as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as eco-imperialism by Nordic countries. As they strive to be standard bearers for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, water power facilities, and mines on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their legal protections, livelihoods, and way of life are threatened. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to stand your ground when the arguments are grounded in saving the world," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the discourse of sustainability, but still it's just striving to find alternative ways to maintain practices of use."

Individual Struggles

The artist and her family have personally clashed with the national administration over its ever-stricter rules on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's brother undertook a set of finally failed court actions over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara created a extended series of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive screen of numerous animal bones, which was shown at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it resides in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

For numerous Indigenous people, art seems the exclusive realm in which they can be listened to by outsiders. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|