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Attendees to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an simulated sun, slid down spiral slides, and observed robotic sea creatures drifting through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nose cavities of a reindeer. The latest artistic project for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a labyrinthine construction modeled after the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nasal airways. Once inside, they can meander around or chill out on skins, tuning in on earphones to community leaders telling tales and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It could sound quirky, but the exhibit celebrates a rarely recognized natural marvel: experts have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the ambient air it inhales by eighty degrees, helping the creature to thrive in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara notes, "produces a sense of smallness that you as a human being are not superior over nature." Sara is a former writer, writer for kids, and environmental activist, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that fosters the chance to change your perspective or spark some modesty," she continues.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The maze-like installation is part of a features in Sara's engaging commission showcasing the traditions, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They have endured oppression, integration policies, and suppression of their dialect by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the work also spotlights the people's issues relating to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Materials

Along the extended entry slope, there's a towering, 26-meter structure of pelts ensnared by utility lines. It serves as a metaphor for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part heavenly staircase, this part of the installation, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein thick layers of ice appear as varying conditions liquefy and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' main cold-season sustenance, moss. The condition is a result of global heating, which is taking place up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and joined Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they carried trailers of food pellets on to the exposed frozen landscape to distribute by hand. These animals surrounded round us, scratching the icy ground in vain for mossy morsels. This costly and labour-intensive process is having a severe effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the other option is death. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are dying—some from starvation, others suffocating after falling into streams through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the installation is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of elements, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

The sculpture also emphasizes the sharp contrast between the western view of electricity as a asset to be harnessed for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of life force as an innate power in animals, humans, and land. This venue's legacy as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by regional governments. While attempting to be standard bearers for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have clashed with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, river barriers, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, livelihoods, and culture are threatened. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to protect your rights when the arguments are rooted in saving the world," Sara notes. "Mining practices has appropriated the rhetoric of environmentalism, but yet it's just aiming to find alternative ways to maintain practices of expenditure."

Family Conflicts

Sara and her kin have themselves conflicted with the state authorities over its ever-stricter rules on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's sibling initiated a sequence of unsuccessful lawsuits over the forced culling of his livestock, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara produced a multi-year collection of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi including a huge drape of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was shown at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it resides in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

For numerous Indigenous people, art seems the sole realm in which they can be heard by outsiders. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|