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Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an simulated sun, descended down amusement rides, and witnessed robotic jellyfish floating through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nose chambers of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this cavernous space—developed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a winding design modeled after the expanded inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Upon entering, they can wander around or unwind on skins, listening on earphones to community leaders imparting tales and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why the nose? It could sound whimsical, but the installation celebrates a little-known biological feat: experts have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it inhales by eighty degrees, helping the animal to endure in extreme Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara notes, "produces a feeling of insignificance that you as a human being are not in control over nature." Sara is a former reporter, young adult author, and environmental activist, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that creates the possibility to alter your perspective or trigger some humbleness," she adds.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The winding design is among various elements in Sara's immersive exhibition honoring the heritage, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They've endured discrimination, cultural suppression, and suppression of their language by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the installation also highlights the community's challenges connected to the global warming, loss of territory, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Materials

Along the long access ramp, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot sculpture of pelts trapped by utility lines. It serves as a symbol for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Part pylon, part spiritual ascent, this section of the installation, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which solid coatings of ice develop as changing conditions thaw and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' main winter sustenance, moss. This phenomenon is a consequence of global heating, which is happening up to four times faster in the Polar region than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a icy season and accompanied Sámi herders on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they hauled trailers of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to distribute by hand. The herd gathered round us, digging the frozen ground in futility for mossy morsels. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive procedure is having a severe impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the alternative is malnutrition. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are succumbing—a number from hunger, others suffocating after sinking in lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the work is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Perspectives

The installation also emphasizes the sharp difference between the western interpretation of power as a commodity to be exploited for profit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of life force as an innate essence in creatures, individuals, and the environment. Tate Modern's past as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by regional governments. In their efforts to be standard bearers for clean sources, Nordic nations have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, river barriers, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their legal protections, ways of life, and culture are threatened. "It's challenging being such a limited population to defend yourself when the justifications are rooted in environmental protection," Sara comments. "Extractivism has co-opted the discourse of environmentalism, but still it's just aiming to find better ways to continue habits of consumption."

Individual Challenges

Sara and her kin have themselves disagreed with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter policies on herding. A few years ago, Sara's brother initiated a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful court actions over the required reduction of his livestock, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara developed a four-year series of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi including a huge screen of four hundred cranial remains, which was shown at the 2017's art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it hangs in the lobby.

Art as Awareness

Among the community, creative work is the only sphere in which they can be understood by outsiders. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|