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Attendees to Tate Modern are familiar to surprising displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They have basked under an artificial sun, descended down amusement rides, and seen automated sea creatures drifting through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a maze-like structure modeled after the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nasal passages. Upon entering, they can wander around or relax on skins, listening on earphones to Sámi elders telling stories and insights.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It could seem quirky, but the exhibit pays tribute to a little-known natural marvel: researchers have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it takes in by eighty degrees, allowing the creature to survive in harsh Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "generates a perception of smallness that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." She is a ex- journalist, children's author, and land defender, who comes from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that generates the possibility to alter your perspective or trigger some humbleness," she adds.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The maze-like design is part of a components in Sara's engaging exhibition showcasing the heritage, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They've endured oppression, forced assimilation, and eradication of their dialect by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the art also spotlights the group's challenges relating to the climate crisis, loss of territory, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Elements

On the long entrance incline, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot structure of pelts ensnared by utility lines. It represents a symbol for the societal frameworks constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this part of the artwork, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein thick coatings of ice develop as changing weather liquefy and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' key winter food, fungus. The condition is a outcome of global heating, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Far North than globally.

A few years back, I met with Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and joined Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they transported carts of food pellets on to the wind-scoured tundra to distribute through labor. The herd gathered round us, pawing the frozen ground in futility for mossy bits. This expensive and labour-intensive process is having a drastic influence on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the choice is death. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are dying—a number from lack of food, others suffocating after sinking in streams through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the work is a tribute to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

This artwork also highlights the stark divergence between the industrial interpretation of power as a resource to be utilized for profit and survival and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an natural essence in animals, people, and the environment. The gallery's history as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be exemplars for sustainable power, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, river barriers, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their human rights, incomes, and culture are at risk. "It's challenging being such a limited population to protect your rights when the justifications are based on environmental protection," Sara comments. "Mining practices has adopted the rhetoric of ecology, but yet it's just attempting to find alternative ways to maintain practices of consumption."

Personal Conflicts

She and her kin have personally clashed with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter regulations on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's sibling embarked on a set of unsuccessful court actions over the forced culling of his herd, apparently to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara developed a extended collection of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi including a huge screen of four hundred animal bones, which was displayed at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it hangs in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Activism

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