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Visitors to Tate Modern are accustomed to unexpected displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an artificial sun, slid down spiral slides, and seen automated sea creatures floating through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nasal chambers of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a maze-like design inspired by the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nasal airways. Once inside, they can stroll around or unwind on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to Sámi elders sharing tales and insights.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It might sound playful, but the artwork honors a obscure biological feat: experts have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it inhales by 80°C, helping the creature to thrive in harsh Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "produces a feeling of smallness that you as a human being are not in control over nature." Sara is a former reporter, young adult author, and environmental activist, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that generates the possibility to alter your viewpoint or evoke some humility," she states.

A Tribute to Traditional Ways

The labyrinthine design is among various components in Sara's absorbing commission honoring the culture, knowledge, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They've faced discrimination, cultural suppression, and repression of their tongue by all four nations. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the installation also spotlights the people's struggles connected to the climate crisis, loss of territory, and external control.

Metaphor in Materials

At the extended entry incline, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot sculpture of pelts trapped by utility lines. It serves as a metaphor for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this component of the exhibit, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, wherein solid sheets of ice develop as changing weather thaw and ice over the snow, locking in the reindeers' main cold-season sustenance, moss. The condition is a outcome of planetary warming, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than elsewhere.

Previously, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and went with Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they transported trailers of food pellets on to the exposed Arctic plains to distribute manually. The herd surrounded round us, digging the slippery ground in vain for vegetative pieces. This expensive and demanding method is having a severe impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the choice is death. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are dying—some from starvation, others submerging after sinking in water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the art is a memorial to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

This artwork also highlights the stark divergence between the modern interpretation of electricity as a commodity to be exploited for profit and existence and the Sámi outlook of energy as an innate life force in creatures, individuals, and the environment. Tate Modern's history as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be leaders for renewable energy, Nordic nations have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of wind energy projects, water power facilities, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their human rights, incomes, and culture are at risk. "It's very difficult being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the reasons are based on environmental protection," Sara comments. "Extractivism has adopted the discourse of sustainability, but still it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to persist in habits of use."

Family Conflicts

Sara and her relatives have themselves conflicted with the national administration over its increasingly stringent policies on herding. In 2016, Sara's brother undertook a series of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the required reduction of his herd, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara developed a four-year collection of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive curtain of four hundred animal bones, which was shown at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it resides in the entrance.

Art as Activism

Among the community, creative work appears the only domain in which they can be heard by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|