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Guests to Tate Modern are used to surprising encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an simulated sun, glided down amusement rides, and witnessed AI-powered jellyfish floating through the air. But this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nasal passages of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a labyrinthine structure modeled after the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nose passages. Upon entering, they can stroll around or unwind on skins, listening on earphones to community leaders telling tales and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

Why choose the nasal structure? It might seem quirky, but the installation celebrates a obscure scientific wonder: experts have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it takes in by 80°C, helping the animal to survive in extreme Arctic conditions. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "generates a feeling of inferiority that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." She is a ex- reporter, young adult author, and land defender, who is from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that fosters the potential to change your outlook or spark some modesty," she adds.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The winding installation is among various components in Sara's engaging exhibition honoring the heritage, science, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They have experienced oppression, integration policies, and suppression of their language by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi mythology and origin tale, the installation also highlights the community's issues relating to the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and external control.

Symbolism in Elements

Along the long entry slope, there's a soaring, 26-metre structure of skins trapped by utility lines. It serves as a analogy for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part spiritual ascent, this section of the artwork, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby solid coatings of ice develop as fluctuating weather melt and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' main cold-season sustenance, fungus. Goavvi is a outcome of planetary warming, which is occurring up to four times faster in the Polar region than globally.

Previously, I visited Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and joined Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they carried trailers of food pellets on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to provide by hand. The herd surrounded round us, scratching the slippery ground in vain for lichen-covered morsels. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive method is having a significant effect on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. Yet the choice is starvation. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are perishing—some from lack of food, others submerging after sinking in streams through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the work is a monument to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

The installation also emphasizes the clear divergence between the industrial interpretation of electricity as a resource to be utilized for gain and existence and the Sámi worldview of energy as an natural power in animals, people, and nature. Tate Modern's past as a fossil fuel plant is connected to this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by regional governments. As they strive to be standard bearers for renewable energy, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and way of life are threatened. "It's hard being such a small minority to defend yourself when the reasons are grounded in global sustainability," Sara comments. "Extractivism has adopted the discourse of sustainability, but still it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to persist in patterns of consumption."

Family Conflicts

She and her kin have themselves conflicted with the national administration over its ever-stricter policies on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's brother undertook a set of unsuccessful court actions over the required reduction of his livestock, supposedly to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a multi-year series of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive screen of numerous animal bones, which was displayed at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it hangs in the lobby.

Art as Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, visual expression seems the sole domain in which they can be understood by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|