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Attendees to Tate Modern are accustomed to unusual displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an man-made sun, glided down helter skelters, and seen AI-powered jellyfish floating through the air. But this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nose chambers of a reindeer. The newest artistic project for this huge space—developed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes patrons into a maze-like structure modeled after the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Inside, they can meander around or relax on pelts, listening on headphones to tribal seniors imparting narratives and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It may sound playful, but the installation pays tribute to a little-known biological feat: scientists have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it inhales by 80°C, allowing the creature to survive in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "produces a sense of insignificance that you as a person are not dominant over nature." She is a ex- reporter, children's author, and land defender, who is from a pastoral family in northern Norway. "Maybe that generates the potential to shift your viewpoint or evoke some modesty," she continues.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The winding structure is part of a components in Sara's engaging exhibition honoring the culture, understanding, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number about 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They've faced persecution, forced assimilation, and repression of their language by all four nations. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi mythology and origin tale, the installation also spotlights the group's issues connected to the global warming, property rights, and external control.

Meaning in Components

Along the extended entrance incline, there's a towering, 26-metre formation of pelts ensnared by power and light cables. It represents a symbol for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this component of the installation, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein dense coatings of ice form as changing temperatures thaw and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' main winter sustenance, lichen. This phenomenon is a consequence of climate change, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Far North than in other regions.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they transported trailers of food pellets on to the barren Arctic plains to dispense by hand. The herd gathered round us, digging the icy ground in futility for lichen-covered pieces. This resource-intensive and demanding procedure is having a severe influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. However the other option is malnutrition. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are dying—a number from lack of food, others drowning after plunging into water bodies through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the installation is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

This artwork also emphasizes the clear divergence between the western understanding of power as a resource to be harnessed for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an natural essence in animals, humans, and land. This venue's past as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by regional governments. As they strive to be exemplars for renewable energy, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, river barriers, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and traditions are threatened. "It's hard being such a limited population to protect your rights when the justifications are grounded in environmental protection," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the discourse of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find better ways to maintain patterns of use."

Individual Struggles

The artist and her kin have personally disagreed with the national administration over its ever-stricter regulations on herding. In 2016, Sara's brother initiated a series of unsuccessful legal cases over the forced culling of his herd, supposedly to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara produced a four-year collection of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal curtain of numerous animal bones, which was exhibited at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the entryway.

Art as Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, art seems the sole sphere in which they can be listened to by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|