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Attendees to Tate Modern are accustomed to unusual displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an simulated sun, descended down spiral slides, and witnessed robotic sea creatures drifting through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nose chambers of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this huge space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a winding structure based on the expanded inside of a reindeer's nasal passages. Once inside, they can wander around or chill out on reindeer hides, tuning in on earphones to tribal seniors telling tales and knowledge.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why choose the nasal structure? It might appear quirky, but the artwork celebrates a little-known scientific wonder: researchers have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it breathes in by eighty degrees, helping the animal to thrive in extreme Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara notes, "produces a feeling of smallness that you as a individual are not in control over nature." Sara is a ex- writer, young adult author, and land defender, who is from a reindeer-herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Possibly that generates the possibility to change your perspective or spark some humbleness," she continues.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The winding installation is among various elements in Sara's absorbing exhibition honoring the culture, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They've endured oppression, forced assimilation, and repression of their dialect by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the art also draws attention to the group's issues associated with the climate crisis, property rights, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Elements

Along the lengthy entrance incline, there's a towering, 26-meter formation of pelts entangled by electrical wires. It serves as a analogy for the political and economic systems restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this part of the installation, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, in which dense coatings of ice develop as fluctuating weather melt and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary cold-season nourishment, moss. Goavvi is a result of climate change, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Far North than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I met with Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and went with Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they transported trailers of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to distribute through labor. The herd surrounded round us, digging the icy ground in vain for lichen-covered bits. This expensive and laborious procedure is having a significant impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. However the choice is starvation. As these icy periods become routine, reindeer are succumbing—a number from lack of food, others submerging after falling into water bodies through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the work is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Perspectives

The installation also highlights the clear contrast between the western interpretation of power as a commodity to be harnessed for profit and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of life force as an innate essence in animals, people, and nature. Tate Modern's history as a fossil fuel plant is linked with this, as is what the Sámi consider environmental exploitation by Nordic countries. In their efforts to be standard bearers for sustainable power, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, river barriers, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and way of life are endangered. "It's hard being such a tiny group to protect your rights when the reasons are based on environmental protection," Sara comments. "Mining practices has co-opted the discourse of environmentalism, but yet it's just attempting to find better ways to persist in practices of use."

Individual Challenges

Sara and her kin have personally disagreed with the state authorities over its increasingly stringent rules on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's brother undertook a series of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the required reduction of his animals, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara created a extended series of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge screen of 400 reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the 2017's art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it is displayed in the lobby.

The Role of Art in Advocacy

For numerous Indigenous people, visual expression is the only domain in which they can be understood by outsiders. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|