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Guests to Tate Modern are familiar to surprising encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have basked under an simulated sun, descended down spiral slides, and seen automated sea creatures hovering through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this immense space—designed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a winding structure based on the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Inside, they can meander around or unwind on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to community leaders imparting tales and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

Why choose the nasal structure? It may sound whimsical, but the exhibit celebrates a rarely recognized scientific wonder: experts have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the surrounding air it inhales by 80 degrees celsius, helping the creature to survive in extreme Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "creates a sense of insignificance that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." The artist is a ex- journalist, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Maybe that fosters the potential to change your outlook or trigger some humility," she states.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The maze-like installation is among various elements in Sara's absorbing commission showcasing the culture, science, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They have faced persecution, integration policies, and repression of their tongue by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the installation also spotlights the community's challenges associated with the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Meaning in Materials

Along the lengthy entrance incline, there's a soaring, 26-metre sculpture of reindeer hides entangled by utility lines. It serves as a analogy for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part heavenly staircase, this component of the artwork, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, whereby thick coatings of ice develop as fluctuating conditions melt and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary cold-season sustenance, fungus. The condition is a consequence of global heating, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Polar region than elsewhere.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a icy season and went with Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they hauled trailers of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to provide through labor. The herd gathered round us, scratching the frozen ground in vain attempts for lichen-covered bits. This resource-intensive and laborious procedure is having a drastic effect on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. But the other option is malnutrition. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are dying—some from lack of food, others suffocating after plunging into water bodies through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the installation is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm introducing the condition to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

The installation also underscores the sharp divergence between the industrial view of energy as a commodity to be harnessed for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an inherent power in animals, individuals, and land. This venue's history as a fossil fuel plant is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by Nordic countries. While attempting to be leaders for renewable energy, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their traditional territory; the Sámi argue their legal protections, ways of life, and way of life are threatened. "It's challenging being such a limited population to defend yourself when the justifications are based on environmental protection," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the language of ecology, but nonetheless it's just striving to find alternative ways to persist in patterns of consumption."

Individual Conflicts

Sara and her family have themselves clashed with the national administration over its ever-stricter policies on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's brother embarked on a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the required reduction of his animals, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara produced a four-year series of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive curtain of numerous reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it hangs in the entryway.

Art as Activism

Among the community, visual expression seems the only domain in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|