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Visitors to Tate Modern are used to surprising displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've basked under an man-made sun, glided down amusement rides, and observed automated jellyfish floating through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nasal cavities of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this immense space—developed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a winding structure modeled after the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Upon entering, they can meander around or unwind on pelts, tuning in on earphones to tribal seniors imparting narratives and wisdom.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It might appear quirky, but the artwork honors a little-known natural marvel: scientists have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it inhales by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the animal to endure in harsh Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "produces a feeling of smallness that you as a individual are not superior over nature." Sara is a former writer, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who is from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Possibly that fosters the possibility to change your viewpoint or trigger some humility," she states.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The maze-like design is one of several components in Sara's engaging art project honoring the traditions, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They've faced discrimination, forced assimilation, and suppression of their tongue by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the art also spotlights the group's issues associated with the climate crisis, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Materials

Along the lengthy access slope, there's a soaring, 26-meter formation of skins ensnared by utility lines. It serves as a symbol for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this part of the artwork, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, wherein thick sheets of ice form as changing conditions melt and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' main cold-season food, moss. The condition is a outcome of planetary warming, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Far North than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and went with Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they transported trailers of food pellets on to the exposed Arctic plains to provide by hand. The reindeer surrounded round us, scratching the icy ground in futility for vegetative morsels. This expensive and demanding process is having a significant influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. Yet the alternative is malnutrition. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—a number from lack of food, others suffocating after plunging into lakes and rivers through prematurely melting ice. To some extent, the art is a monument to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

The installation also emphasizes the clear contrast between the western interpretation of energy as a commodity to be exploited for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an inherent life force in creatures, people, and the environment. The gallery's history as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be leaders for renewable energy, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the development of wind energy projects, river barriers, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their human rights, incomes, and traditions are at risk. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to stand your ground when the justifications are rooted in global sustainability," Sara comments. "Extractivism has co-opted the language of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just attempting to find better ways to maintain practices of consumption."

Personal Conflicts

The artist and her family have personally conflicted with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent policies on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's sibling embarked on a set of unsuccessful legal cases over the forced culling of his animals, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara produced a extended series of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal screen of 400 cranial remains, which was displayed at the 2017 event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it hangs in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For many Sámi, art seems the only domain in which they can be listened to by the global community. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|