Visitors to London's Tate Modern are encountering their most unusual experience yet as they step inside a massive recreation of a reindeer's nasal passages. The latest artist commission for the museum's famous Turbine Hall comes from Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara, who has created an immersive installation that invites gallery visitors into a labyrinthine structure modeled on the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nose. Once inside, guests can wander through the maze-like passages or relax on reindeer hides while listening through headphones to Sámi elders sharing traditional stories and knowledge.
The choice to focus on a reindeer's nose might seem playful, but Sara's installation pays tribute to an remarkable natural phenomenon that scientists have discovered. In less than one second, a reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it breathes by 80 degrees Celsius, allowing the animal to survive in the harsh Arctic temperatures. By scaling the nose up to larger than human size, Sara explains that she wants to create "a sense of inferiority that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." The artist, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway and worked as a journalist and children's author before becoming a land defender, believes this perspective shift might "trigger some humbleness" in visitors.
The maze-like nasal structure represents just one component of Sara's comprehensive commission celebrating the culture, science, and philosophy of the Sámi people, Europe's only Indigenous community. The semi-nomadic Sámi population of roughly 100,000 people spans across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula in an area they call Sápmi. Throughout history, all four nations have subjected the Sámi to persecution, forced assimilation, and suppression of their language. By centering her work on the reindeer, an animal that holds crucial importance in Sámi cosmology and creation stories, Sara draws attention to her community's ongoing struggles with climate change, land dispossession, and colonialism.
The installation's entrance ramp features a towering 26-meter structure made of reindeer hides trapped within power and electrical cables, serving as a powerful metaphor for the political and economic systems that constrain the Sámi people. This component, titled "Goavve," references the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon where dense ice layers form as fluctuating temperatures repeatedly melt and refreeze snow, trapping the reindeer's primary winter food source of lichen beneath impenetrable ice. This goavvi phenomenon results directly from global warming, which occurs up to four times faster in the Arctic region than anywhere else on Earth.
Three years ago, during a goavvi winter, Sara witnessed firsthand the devastating impact of this climate phenomenon when she visited Sámi herders in Guovdageaidnu in Norway's far north. She accompanied the herders on snowmobiles through bitter cold as they hauled trailers filled with food pellets across wind-swept tundra to manually feed their animals. The reindeer crowded around desperately, pawing at the icy ground in futile attempts to find the mossy vegetation they typically eat. This costly and labor-intensive feeding process severely impacts traditional reindeer husbandry and threatens the animals' natural self-sufficiency, but herders face no alternative except watching their animals starve.
As goavvi winters become increasingly common, reindeer deaths are mounting from both starvation and drowning when they fall through prematurely melting ice into lakes and rivers. Sara describes her installation as "a monument to them," explaining that "with the layering of materials, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London." The sculpture also highlights the fundamental difference between Western concepts of power as a resource to be exploited for profit and survival, versus the Sámi worldview that sees energy as an inherent life force present in animals, people, and land.
The location at Tate Modern, a former coal and oil power station, adds another layer of meaning to Sara's work, as does what the Sámi consider "green colonialism" by Scandinavian governments. In their efforts to become leaders in renewable energy, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over construction of wind farms, hydroelectric dams, and mines on ancestral Sámi lands. The Sámi argue that these projects threaten their human rights, livelihoods, and traditional way of life. Sara notes the particular challenge facing her community: "It's very difficult being such a small minority to defend yourself when the arguments are rooted in saving the world. Extractivism has adopted the language of ecology, but still it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to continue habits of consumption."
Sara and her family have personally experienced conflict with the Norwegian government over increasingly restrictive herding policies. In 2016, her brother launched a series of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits challenging the forced culling of his reindeer herd, which the government claimed was necessary to prevent overgrazing. Supporting her brother's fight, Sara created a four-year series of artworks titled "Pile O'Sápmi," including a massive curtain made from 400 reindeer skulls that was displayed at the prestigious 2017 Documenta 14 art exhibition and later acquired by Oslo's National Museum, where it now hangs in the entrance.
For many Sámi people, art represents the only platform where they can effectively communicate with people from other nations. In 2022, Sara joined two other Indigenous artists in representing Norway, Finland, and Sweden at the Venice Biennale when the Nordic Pavilion was temporarily renamed the Sámi Pavilion. Her Turbine Hall commission therefore carries significant political importance for both the Sámi community and Indigenous rights globally. Katya García-Antón, who curated the 2022 Sámi Pavilion, explains that the Turbine Hall work "has so much synergy for Indigenous people globally, and for so many people who are not Indigenous, but who also feel strongly about the importance of ecological justice. It will bring that conversation about rising temperatures closer. People will see that it's not across the Atlantic or somewhere in the Amazon. It's in Europe."
Sara emphasizes that her message doesn't pit Western science against Indigenous knowledge, but rather explores how crucial, life-sustaining information has been gathered and transferred through generations of Sámi people through their close attunement to nature. This deep connection manifests through her choice of materials: animal pelts, bones, wood, and power cables. A carefully crafted soundscape washes over the Turbine Hall, combining natural sounds of reindeer herds, mosquitoes, and birds with traditional Sámi songs called joiks and the industrial hum and reverberation of machinery.
The structure modeled on reindeer nasal passages is called "Geabbil," meaning "smartly adaptable" in the Sámi language. Built with wooden poles carved with the distinctive reindeer earmarks that have identified generations of herds tended by Sara's family, the structure alludes to traditional Sámi practices of constructing temporary shelters. The walls feature decorations made from reindeer bones and skulls, referencing her earlier "Pile O'Sápmi" series. While Western visitors might initially view the use of reindeer parts in artwork as cruel to animals, Sara's approach reflects the fundamental Sámi concept of "duodji" – often roughly translated as "craft" but actually embodying an entire philosophy of life based on the interdependence of humans, animals, and nature, ensuring that nothing from any slaughtered animal goes to waste.
Drawing from childhood memories, Sara recalls a formative experience when her normally strong and resourceful father was summoned to a police station for allegedly allowing his reindeer to eat flowers. She was shocked to witness how her father's posture, voice, and gaze changed in the presence of a high-ranking police officer, but most memorably, she noticed his sudden uncomfortable smell, which she later understood represented his fear. This realization led her to understand that reindeer similarly emit warning scents through their bodies when stressed. "Looking at smell as a language, my memory started to make sense, understanding that we are linked with animals biologically and spiritually in every way," Sara explains. "As a child in that moment I was given so much information by my father's presence, but wasn't able to receive it."
To enhance the sensory experience of her installation, Sara collaborated with Algerian perfumer Nadjib Achaibou to capture the actual scent of frightened reindeer, which is diffused around the goavvi installation to reinforce negative associations with extractivism and other causes of climate breakdown. In contrast, a pleasant aroma designed to evoke reindeer milk, Sara's own breast milk, and natural sweetgrass creates a hopeful atmosphere at the entrance to the geabbil nose structure. These carefully chosen scents can trigger powerful physical reactions in visitors. Sara notes that "the first blocks off my body," while the second scent causes her to instinctively feel "my posture changing and my lungs and chest opening up."
For Sara, this Tate commission represents significant potential for positive change. "There's something very hopeful about the potential of anyone sitting down to soak this in with openness in their bodies and perspectives," she says. "For me this is also a futuristic project, an invitation to learn from and incorporate Indigenous philosophy and knowledge into a global future." Máret Ánne Sara's Hyundai commission will remain on display at Tate Modern in London until April 6.
