Máret Ánne Sara Wins Tate Modern’s 2025 Turbine Hall Commission
141March 6, 2025
Tate Modern, London, on March 4 revealed that it has awarded Northern Sámi artist and author Máret Ánne Sara the 2025Turbine Hall commission. Sara is known for sculptures and installations exploring global ecological issues through the lens of her lived experience within the Sámi community. Among the themes she has taken up to date are the effects of Nordic colonialism on Sámi ways of life and the importance of preserving Sámi ancestral knowledge and values to protect the environment for future generations. Her commission, the first public display of her work in the UK, will open on October 14 and will remain on view through April 6, 2026.
“Máret Ánne Sara is among a prolific group of Sámi artists who have received widespread international attention in recent years for making visible the issues facing Sápmi and Sámi people,” said Tate Modern director Karin Hindsbo in a statement. “By addressing the major social, ecological and political concerns of her community, Sara hopes not only to increase interest and awareness, but also to effect real change. I’m thrilled she will be creating her first work in the UK here at Tate Modern and I look forward to seeing how she will transform the Turbine Hall. I’m sure it will be both challenging and full of wonder.”
Born in 1983 to a Sámi reindeer herding family in Guovdageaidnu in the Norwegian part of Sápmi, where she lives and works today, Sara frequently incorporates into her practice materials and methodologies derived from reindeer herding. The founder of the Dáiddadállu artist collective, she has shown her work at major exhibitions including Documenta 14 and the Fifty-Ninth Venice Biennale. Sara points up the reciprocal relationship between animals, humans, and the environment in works such as the 2017 installation Pile o’ Sápmi, shown at Documenta. Featuring hundreds of reindeer skulls hung in a curtain, the installation commented on the cull decreed by the Norwegian Reindeer Herding Act, which goes against Sámi traditions. Another work, Ale suova sielu sáiget, 2022, a rotating carousel of cured red reindeer calves and dried plants from the tundra, presented at the Venice Biennale, addressed the impact of climate change on both the animals and the Sámi people.