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Attendees to Tate Modern are familiar to unexpected experiences in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've basked under an artificial sun, slid down helter skelters, and observed automated sea creatures drifting through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nasal chambers of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this huge space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages patrons into a labyrinthine structure inspired by the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nasal airways. Once inside, they can wander around or relax on skins, tuning in on earphones to Sámi elders imparting tales and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It may seem playful, but the exhibit honors a obscure scientific wonder: experts have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it inhales by 80°C, allowing the animal to survive in extreme Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "generates a feeling of insignificance that you as a individual are not in control over nature." The artist is a former reporter, children's author, and environmental activist, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that generates the chance to alter your outlook or trigger some modesty," she continues.

A Tribute to Traditional Ways

The winding installation is part of a features in Sara's engaging exhibition showcasing the traditions, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi number roughly 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They have experienced discrimination, integration policies, and repression of their tongue by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the work also spotlights the group's issues associated with the climate crisis, land dispossession, and external control.

Meaning in Components

At the lengthy entry incline, there's a towering, 26-meter formation of skins trapped by power and light cables. It serves as a analogy for the societal frameworks restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this component of the installation, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein dense layers of ice appear as changing conditions melt and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' main cold-season nourishment, moss. This phenomenon is a consequence of global heating, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than globally.

Previously, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they transported containers of food pellets on to the barren Arctic plains to provide by hand. The reindeer crowded round us, digging the frozen ground in futility for mossy pieces. This costly and laborious process is having a significant impact on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. However the alternative is starvation. As goavvi winters become frequent, reindeer are dying—a number from lack of food, others drowning after plunging into lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the installation is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm introducing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

The sculpture also underscores the sharp contrast between the industrial understanding of power as a asset to be utilized for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an natural essence in animals, people, and nature. This venue's legacy as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as eco-imperialism by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be leaders for clean sources, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, river barriers, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and culture are threatened. "It's very difficult being such a tiny group to protect your rights when the arguments are rooted in environmental protection," Sara comments. "Mining practices has co-opted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but still it's just attempting to find better ways to continue patterns of use."

Personal Struggles

She and her family have personally disagreed with the national administration over its ever-stricter policies on herding. A few years ago, Sara's sibling embarked on a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the required reduction of his herd, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara developed a extended collection of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge screen of four hundred animal bones, which was shown at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the entrance.

Art as Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work is the only realm in which they can be understood by outsiders. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|