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Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an artificial sun, slid down amusement rides, and observed robotic jellyfish drifting through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nasal passages of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes patrons into a maze-like structure inspired by the expanded inside of a reindeer's nose cavities. Once inside, they can wander around or chill out on skins, tuning in on earphones to community leaders imparting narratives and insights.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It might appear playful, but the artwork honors a little-known natural marvel: scientists have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it inhales by 80°C, enabling the creature to endure in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "generates a sense of insignificance that you as a human being are not superior over nature." The artist is a ex- writer, children's author, and land defender, who comes from a pastoral family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that generates the chance to shift your outlook or spark some humility," she states.

A Tribute to Indigenous Heritage

The maze-like structure is among various components in Sara's engaging commission celebrating the traditions, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They've faced discrimination, cultural suppression, and eradication of their tongue by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi belief system and founding narrative, the work also spotlights the people's struggles connected to the environmental emergency, property rights, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Elements

On the long entry slope, there's a towering, 26-metre structure of pelts ensnared by utility lines. It can be read as a symbol for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this part of the installation, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which thick sheets of ice form as fluctuating conditions melt and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' key winter food, fungus. The condition is a outcome of planetary warming, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Polar region than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and joined Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they hauled trailers of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to distribute through labor. The herd gathered round us, pawing the icy ground in futility for lichen-covered bits. This costly and demanding method is having a drastic impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the choice is death. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are succumbing—a number from starvation, others suffocating after plunging into streams through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the art is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

This artwork also underscores the sharp difference between the modern understanding of electricity as a asset to be exploited for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an inherent life force in creatures, people, and nature. This venue's past as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by Nordic countries. In their efforts to be standard bearers for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, river barriers, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi assert their human rights, ways of life, and way of life are at risk. "It's challenging being such a limited population to protect your rights when the justifications are rooted in global sustainability," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but yet it's just striving to find alternative ways to continue patterns of consumption."

Individual Struggles

She and her relatives have themselves conflicted with the state authorities over its tightening regulations on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's sibling undertook a set of finally failed lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a four-year collection of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge curtain of 400 animal bones, which was displayed at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the lobby.

Creative Expression as Activism

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