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Guests to Tate Modern are familiar to unexpected displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They've basked under an simulated sun, glided down helter skelters, and witnessed robotic jellyfish hovering through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this cavernous space—designed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a winding structure based on the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose cavities. Inside, they can stroll around or chill out on skins, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors telling tales and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why the nose? It could appear playful, but the installation pays tribute to a rarely recognized biological feat: scientists have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it inhales by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the animal to endure in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "generates a perception of inferiority that you as a human being are not superior over nature." She is a former reporter, children's author, and land defender, who hails from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that fosters the possibility to alter your perspective or trigger some humility," she states.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The maze-like structure is part of a components in Sara's engaging art project celebrating the traditions, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number about 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They've faced oppression, integration policies, and repression of their tongue by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the installation also draws attention to the community's struggles connected to the climate crisis, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Materials

Along the lengthy access incline, there's a soaring, 26-metre structure of skins ensnared by electrical wires. It represents a analogy for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this component of the artwork, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein dense coatings of ice form as changing temperatures liquefy and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' key winter food, fungus. This phenomenon is a consequence of planetary warming, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Polar region than globally.

Previously, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and went with Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they carried carts of supplementary feed on to the barren frozen landscape to provide through labor. The herd surrounded round us, pawing the frozen ground in futility for lichen-covered morsels. This costly and laborious procedure is having a drastic impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. But the choice is malnutrition. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are succumbing—a number from lack of food, others drowning after plunging into lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the installation is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

This artwork also emphasizes the stark divergence between the western understanding of power as a resource to be utilized for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of energy as an innate power in animals, people, and the environment. This venue's past as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider eco-imperialism by Nordic countries. While attempting to be leaders for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of windfarms, river barriers, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi argue their human rights, livelihoods, and traditions are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to protect your rights when the arguments are based on environmental protection," Sara observes. "Mining practices has adopted the discourse of sustainability, but yet it's just attempting to find better ways to maintain habits of consumption."

Family Struggles

Sara and her family have themselves disagreed with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent policies on herding. A few years ago, Sara's brother initiated a set of unsuccessful legal cases over the forced culling of his herd, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara produced a four-year set of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal curtain of 400 cranial remains, which was displayed at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the entrance.

Art as Activism

For many Sámi, creative work seems the exclusive realm in which they can be understood by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|