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Attendees to Tate Modern are accustomed to unexpected displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an artificial sun, slid down helter skelters, and seen AI-powered jellyfish hovering through the air. However this marks the first time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nasal chambers of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this huge space—created by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a maze-like construction inspired by the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nasal passages. Upon entering, they can wander around or relax on pelts, tuning in on earphones to community leaders telling narratives and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why the nose? It may sound playful, but the exhibit honors a rarely recognized biological feat: scientists have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it breathes in by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the animal to thrive in harsh Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "generates a feeling of inferiority that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." Sara is a former reporter, children's author, and land defender, who is from a pastoral family in northern Norway. "Maybe that generates the possibility to alter your outlook or trigger some modesty," she continues.

A Celebration to Indigenous Heritage

The maze-like installation is part of a features in Sara's absorbing commission honoring the culture, knowledge, and philosophy of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They've faced persecution, forced assimilation, and suppression of their dialect by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the installation also spotlights the group's challenges relating to the global warming, land dispossession, and external control.

Meaning in Components

Along the extended entry slope, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot structure of reindeer hides trapped by electrical wires. It can be read as a symbol for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this part of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein solid sheets of ice appear as varying temperatures thaw and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' main winter sustenance, lichen. Goavvi is a consequence of global heating, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than elsewhere.

A few years back, I met with Sara in a remote town during a icy season and went with Sámi herders on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they carried containers of animal nutrition on to the exposed Arctic plains to dispense by hand. These animals crowded round us, digging the icy ground in vain attempts for mossy bits. This resource-intensive and laborious process is having a severe impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. But the alternative is starvation. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—a number from hunger, others suffocating after falling into water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. In a sense, the art is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

The sculpture also highlights the sharp divergence between the western interpretation of power as a commodity to be utilized for profit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of life force as an natural power in animals, humans, and land. This venue's legacy as a fossil fuel plant is connected to this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be standard bearers for renewable energy, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, river barriers, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi argue their legal protections, ways of life, and culture are threatened. "It's very difficult being such a tiny group to protect your rights when the justifications are rooted in global sustainability," Sara comments. "Mining practices has appropriated the rhetoric of ecology, but still it's just attempting to find alternative ways to maintain patterns of expenditure."

Personal Challenges

She and her kin have themselves clashed with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter regulations on herding. A few years ago, Sara's sibling initiated a set of unsuccessful legal cases over the required reduction of his herd, supposedly to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a extended set of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge drape of numerous animal bones, which was exhibited at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the national institution, where it is displayed in the lobby.

Art as Advocacy

Among the community, art seems the exclusive realm in which they can be understood by the global community. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|