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Guests to Tate Modern are accustomed to unusual encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They've basked under an man-made sun, descended down spiral slides, and witnessed AI-powered jellyfish drifting through the air. Yet this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nose cavities of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this immense space—created by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a winding construction inspired by the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose passages. Once inside, they can meander around or unwind on skins, tuning in on headphones to community leaders telling tales and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It might seem playful, but the exhibit honors a rarely recognized biological feat: scientists have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it inhales by 80°C, enabling the creature to survive in inhospitable Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "produces a sense of smallness that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." Sara is a ex- journalist, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who hails from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that fosters the potential to shift your perspective or evoke some modesty," she adds.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The maze-like structure is one of several elements in Sara's immersive commission honoring the culture, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number roughly 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They have experienced discrimination, cultural suppression, and suppression of their tongue by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the work also spotlights the people's struggles connected to the climate crisis, loss of territory, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Elements

Along the extended access incline, there's a looming, 26-metre sculpture of skins ensnared by power and light cables. It serves as a metaphor for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this section of the exhibit, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby dense layers of ice develop as varying temperatures liquefy and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' main winter sustenance, lichen. Goavvi is a outcome of climate change, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than globally.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in a remote town during a icy season and joined Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they hauled trailers of food pellets on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to distribute by hand. These animals surrounded round us, scratching the slippery ground in vain attempts for lichen-covered bits. This costly and demanding process is having a severe influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. However the alternative is death. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are perishing—a number from starvation, others submerging after sinking in lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the work is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Perspectives

The sculpture also underscores the clear contrast between the western view of energy as a asset to be exploited for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of energy as an innate essence in animals, humans, and the environment. This venue's legacy as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi consider eco-imperialism by Nordic countries. As they strive to be standard bearers for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have clashed with the Sámi over the development of windfarms, hydroelectric dams, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their legal protections, livelihoods, and way of life are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to stand your ground when the arguments are based on global sustainability," Sara notes. "Mining practices has appropriated the discourse of sustainability, but nonetheless it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to persist in habits of consumption."

Family Struggles

Sara and her kin have personally disagreed with the state authorities over its tightening rules on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's sibling undertook a series of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the required reduction of his livestock, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara produced a extended collection of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal drape of four hundred cranial remains, which was exhibited at the the show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it hangs in the lobby.

Creative Expression as Activism

For many Sámi, visual expression seems the only domain in which they can be understood by people of other nations. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|