Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall has never shied away from scale or intensity, and this year’s Hyundai Commission pushes both to new extremes. Máret Ánne Sara: Goavve-Geabbil transforms the vast industrial space into an elemental encounter between land, power, and ancestral memory. The Sámi artist’s installation — her first significant work in the UK — draws deeply from her lived experience within a reindeer-herding family in Sápmi, the Arctic territory spanning Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. Here, Sara transforms the Turbine Hall’s steel cathedral into a meditation on survival, ecology, and the spiritual systems that sustain communities in the face of extractive modernity.
At the heart of the commission stands a vertical sculpture that stretches the full 28-metre height of the hall — a column of reindeer hides lashed with electrical cables. It reads at once as both a memorial and a warning. The hides, gathered from her family’s herding practices, evoke both resilience and loss; the cables signal the grip of industrial development on Sámi land. The work’s title, Goavve, describes a natural phenomenon born of climate instability: when rain freezes over snow to form complex layers of ice, preventing reindeer from accessing the lichen beneath — an ecological chokehold that has become increasingly common with the warming Arctic. Sara’s sculpture turns that unseen crisis into form, giving weight to a story that resists abstraction.
For Sara, the Turbine Hall’s past as an oil and coal power station provides a potent counterpoint. Where fossil energy once defined modernity’s reach, she reimagines power as something sacred, alive, and reciprocal — an energy drawn from land and community rather than extracted from it. Her reconfiguration of power feels neither nostalgic nor naïve; instead, it insists on another possible modernity, one rooted in Indigenous science and ecological continuity.
At the eastern end of the hall, visitors encounter -Geabbil, an immersive structure based on the anatomy of a reindeer’s nose — an organ that can warm Arctic air by up to 80 degrees in a single breath. The labyrinthine form invites viewers to move slowly, tracing pathways carved from wood and bone. Each wooden pole is inscribed with traditional Sámi earmarks — hereditary symbols used to identify reindeer and families — making the maze both a map and a lineage. Within these walls, hides and bones are worked into the structure following duodji, the Sámi tradition of making that ensures nothing goes to waste. The act is not decorative but devotional: a gesture of gratitude toward the animal that sustains human life.
Scent and sound operate as key materials throughout. The air carries the smell of reindeer fear — a pheromonal signal of danger — alongside the sharp, living scent of lichen and mountain herbs from Sápmi. A low soundscape weaves through the hall, merging field recordings from the tundra with the rhythmic chant of joik, the Sámi vocal tradition that encodes stories, places, and people. Spoken contributions from elders in Sara’s community add another register — one of oral transmission, knowledge shaped by generations who have lived with, not over, the land.
The Hyundai Commission: Máret Ánne Sara: Goavve-Geabbil arrives as the tenth in Tate’s celebrated annual series, continuing a partnership with Hyundai Motor that now extends until 2036 — the longest corporate collaboration in the museum’s history. Since its inception, the Hyundai Commission has redefined the Turbine Hall as a site for political and sensory experiments: Kara Walker’s monumental fountain, Anicka Yi’s floating organisms, and now Sara’s charged articulation of ecological kinship.
Sara (b. 1983, Guovdageaidnu, Sápmi) is no stranger to scale or confrontation. Her previous works — from “Pile o’Sápmi” at Documenta 14 to installations at the Venice Biennale — have transformed reindeer skulls, sinew, and hide into powerful political instruments, challenging state control and environmental neglect. With Goavve-Geabbil, she brings that same urgency into dialogue with one of the world’s most visited museums, asking viewers to confront the costs of modern power and to listen — literally — to what the Earth is saying back.
Hyundai Commission: Máret Ánne Sara – Goavve-Geabbil Tate Modern, Turbine Hall 14 October 2025 – 6 April 2026 FREE