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Guests to Tate Modern are used to surprising encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an simulated sun, glided down amusement rides, and observed AI-powered sea creatures drifting through the air. But this marks the first time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nose chambers of a reindeer. The current artist commission for this huge space—designed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a winding structure inspired by the expanded inside of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Once inside, they can meander around or relax on pelts, listening on earphones to community leaders telling tales and insights.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why the nose? It might appear playful, but the artwork honors a little-known natural marvel: scientists have discovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it takes in by 80°C, enabling the creature to thrive in inhospitable Arctic climates. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara explains, "creates a perception of smallness that you as a individual are not in control over nature." The artist is a former writer, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who comes from a pastoral family in northern Norway. "Maybe that creates the possibility to change your viewpoint or spark some humbleness," she states.

A Tribute to Indigenous Heritage

The labyrinthine design is among various features in Sara's absorbing commission honoring the traditions, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Partially migratory, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They've faced oppression, integration policies, and eradication of their tongue by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the installation also spotlights the people's issues connected to the climate crisis, land dispossession, and external control.

Metaphor in Elements

Along the long entrance ramp, there's a towering, 26-meter formation of pelts entangled by power and light cables. It represents a metaphor for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this component of the artwork, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby thick sheets of ice form as fluctuating temperatures thaw and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' main winter sustenance, fungus. Goavvi is a result of climate change, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than globally.

A few years back, I visited Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and went with Sámi herders on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they carried containers of food pellets on to the barren frozen landscape to dispense manually. These animals crowded round us, scratching the slippery ground in futility for vegetative pieces. This expensive and laborious procedure is having a severe influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the choice is starvation. As these icy periods become frequent, reindeer are perishing—a number from hunger, others suffocating after falling into lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the art is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Perspectives

The installation also highlights the stark difference between the western understanding of energy as a commodity to be harnessed for profit and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an innate essence in animals, people, and land. Tate Modern's legacy as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be leaders for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi argue their human rights, incomes, and way of life are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the reasons are rooted in saving the world," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the rhetoric of sustainability, but nonetheless it's just striving to find better ways to maintain practices of consumption."

Individual Challenges

Sara and her relatives have personally clashed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent policies on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's sibling undertook a set of ultimately unsuccessful court actions over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a extended set of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge drape of numerous reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the 2017's art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the entryway.

Art as Awareness

For many Sámi, art seems the exclusive sphere in which they can be understood by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|