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Attendees to Tate Modern are accustomed to surprising encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have basked under an artificial sun, slid down amusement rides, and observed robotic sea creatures floating through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nasal passages of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this immense space—created by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a labyrinthine structure modeled after the expanded inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Inside, they can wander around or chill out on reindeer hides, tuning in on earphones to Sámi elders sharing stories and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It could sound playful, but the artwork pays tribute to a obscure scientific wonder: experts have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it takes in by eighty degrees, allowing the creature to survive in harsh Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "generates a feeling of inferiority that you as a person are not superior over nature." She is a former reporter, children's author, and rights advocate, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Possibly that fosters the possibility to shift your outlook or trigger some humility," she adds.

An Homage to Indigenous Heritage

The labyrinthine structure is part of a components in Sara's absorbing exhibition honoring the culture, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number about 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They have endured persecution, integration policies, and eradication of their language by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the work also highlights the group's challenges associated with the climate crisis, property rights, and imperialism.

Meaning in Materials

Along the long access ramp, there's a towering, eighty-five-foot structure of skins trapped by utility lines. It represents a symbol for the political and economic systems restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this section of the installation, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby solid coatings of ice develop as changing temperatures liquefy and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' main winter sustenance, fungus. The condition is a result of climate change, which is occurring up to four times faster in the Polar region than globally.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they hauled carts of food pellets on to the exposed frozen landscape to distribute manually. The herd surrounded round us, pawing the slippery ground in futility for lichen-covered morsels. This costly and demanding method is having a significant influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. However the alternative is death. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are dying—a number from hunger, others drowning after sinking in lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the installation is a monument to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

This artwork also emphasizes the stark divergence between the industrial view of power as a asset to be utilized for profit and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an inherent power in animals, people, and land. Tate Modern's legacy as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi consider environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be leaders for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the development of wind energy projects, river barriers, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, livelihoods, and way of life are endangered. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to protect your rights when the arguments are rooted in saving the world," Sara comments. "Extractivism has adopted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but yet it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to maintain patterns of expenditure."

Individual Challenges

Sara and her relatives have themselves disagreed with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter regulations on herding. In 2016, Sara's sibling initiated a set of finally failed court actions over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a four-year set of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a colossal screen of 400 animal bones, which was shown at the 2017's art exhibition Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the entrance.

Art as Activism

Among the community, creative work appears the sole sphere in which they can be listened to by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|