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Visitors to Tate Modern are used to unexpected encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an simulated sun, glided down amusement rides, and seen AI-powered jellyfish floating through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be immersing themselves in the complex nose cavities of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this cavernous space—developed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a labyrinthine design modeled after the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nose cavities. Inside, they can wander around or chill out on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to tribal seniors sharing narratives and knowledge.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It might sound quirky, but the exhibit celebrates a rarely recognized scientific wonder: researchers have discovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it inhales by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the animal to survive in extreme Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara explains, "generates a sense of smallness that you as a person are not dominant over nature." Sara is a former writer, children's author, and rights advocate, who comes from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that generates the chance to shift your outlook or evoke some humbleness," she continues.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The winding design is among various elements in Sara's absorbing commission honoring the heritage, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They have experienced persecution, integration policies, and repression of their language by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the work also spotlights the people's issues connected to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Meaning in Components

At the lengthy access ramp, there's a looming, 26-metre structure of pelts entangled by electrical wires. It serves as a symbol for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this part of the installation, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, in which solid sheets of ice develop as varying weather liquefy and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' key winter food, fungus. The condition is a result of planetary warming, which is happening up to four times faster in the Far North than globally.

Previously, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a icy season and accompanied Sámi herders on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they transported carts of animal nutrition on to the exposed Arctic plains to dispense through labor. These animals surrounded round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain for mossy morsels. This expensive and demanding process is having a drastic influence on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the choice is malnutrition. As goavvi winters become frequent, reindeer are dying—some from hunger, others suffocating after plunging into streams through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the work is a monument to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

The installation also highlights the clear divergence between the western interpretation of electricity as a asset to be utilized for gain and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of life force as an natural power in creatures, individuals, and land. Tate Modern's legacy as a fossil fuel plant is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be leaders for renewable energy, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, river barriers, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their legal protections, livelihoods, and culture are at risk. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to protect your rights when the reasons are grounded in saving the world," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the discourse of sustainability, but yet it's just striving to find more suitable ways to persist in practices of expenditure."

Individual Challenges

The artist and her relatives have personally disagreed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent rules on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's sibling undertook a sequence of unsuccessful court actions over the required reduction of his livestock, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a extended series of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi including a massive drape of 400 reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the public gallery, where it resides in the entrance.

Art as Activism

For many Sámi, visual expression is the exclusive realm in which they can be heard by the global community. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|