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Attendees to Tate Modern are accustomed to unexpected experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an simulated sun, descended down spiral slides, and observed AI-powered sea creatures hovering through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nasal chambers of a reindeer. The newest artistic project for this cavernous space—designed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a labyrinthine construction modeled after the expanded inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Upon entering, they can stroll around or unwind on skins, tuning in on headphones to community leaders imparting tales and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

Why choose the nasal structure? It might appear quirky, but the exhibit pays tribute to a obscure scientific wonder: experts have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it inhales by 80 degrees celsius, helping the creature to thrive in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "produces a sense of inferiority that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." Sara is a ex- journalist, young adult author, and rights advocate, who comes from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Possibly that fosters the chance to shift your viewpoint or trigger some humility," she adds.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The winding structure is among various components in Sara's engaging art project honoring the culture, understanding, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They have experienced discrimination, integration policies, and suppression of their language by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi mythology and origin tale, the art also spotlights the people's struggles associated with the global warming, property rights, and imperialism.

Meaning in Components

Along the extended access incline, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot structure of pelts trapped by power and light cables. It represents a analogy for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Part pylon, part spiritual ascent, this part of the exhibit, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which solid layers of ice appear as changing weather melt and ice over the snow, locking in the reindeers' primary cold-season food, fungus. The condition is a consequence of global heating, which is happening up to four times faster in the Far North than in other regions.

A few years back, I met with Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and joined Sámi reindeer keepers on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they transported containers of food pellets on to the barren frozen landscape to distribute by hand. The reindeer crowded round us, digging the frozen ground in vain for lichen-covered bits. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive procedure is having a drastic effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. Yet the choice is death. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—some from hunger, others drowning after sinking in water bodies through prematurely melting ice. To some extent, the installation is a memorial to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

The installation also emphasizes the sharp contrast between the modern view of energy as a resource to be exploited for gain and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an innate essence in creatures, people, and nature. This venue's past as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi consider eco-imperialism by regional governments. In their efforts to be exemplars for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of windfarms, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their legal protections, incomes, and traditions are threatened. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to protect your rights when the justifications are based on environmental protection," Sara observes. "Mining practices has appropriated the discourse of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just striving to find alternative ways to continue patterns of consumption."

Personal Challenges

The artist and her relatives have themselves conflicted with the national administration over its ever-stricter regulations on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's sibling embarked on a sequence of finally failed court actions over the required reduction of his animals, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a four-year set of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a colossal screen of numerous cranial remains, which was shown at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the public gallery, where it hangs in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Awareness

Among the community, visual expression is the sole domain in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|