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Visitors to Tate Modern are used to unexpected displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an simulated sun, descended down spiral slides, and witnessed robotic jellyfish floating through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nose chambers of a reindeer. The newest artistic project for this huge space—developed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a maze-like design inspired by the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nasal passages. Inside, they can stroll around or relax on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to Sámi elders sharing stories and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why choose the nasal structure? It may seem playful, but the exhibit celebrates a obscure biological feat: scientists have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it breathes in by eighty degrees, allowing the creature to endure in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "creates a feeling of insignificance that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." Sara is a ex- journalist, young adult author, and land defender, who is from a pastoral family in northern Norway. "Possibly that fosters the potential to change your outlook or evoke some humbleness," she adds.

A Tribute to Traditional Ways

The winding installation is among various components in Sara's engaging art project celebrating the heritage, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They've experienced oppression, integration policies, and suppression of their dialect by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the art also spotlights the group's challenges associated with the climate crisis, loss of territory, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Materials

At the long entry slope, there's a soaring, 26-metre formation of reindeer hides entangled by power and light cables. It represents a symbol for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this section of the installation, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, wherein solid layers of ice develop as varying weather liquefy and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' main winter sustenance, moss. Goavvi is a outcome of climate change, which is happening up to four times faster in the Arctic than globally.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they carried carts of supplementary feed on to the barren Arctic plains to provide manually. The reindeer crowded round us, scratching the slippery ground in vain for vegetative bits. This expensive and demanding procedure is having a drastic influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. But the other option is starvation. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are dying—some from starvation, others submerging after falling into streams through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the art is a tribute to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

The sculpture also underscores the stark difference between the modern interpretation of electricity as a commodity to be harnessed for gain and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an inherent essence in creatures, humans, and nature. Tate Modern's legacy as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as eco-imperialism by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be exemplars for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, river barriers, and mines on their traditional territory; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and culture are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the justifications are grounded in saving the world," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has adopted the discourse of ecology, but yet it's just attempting to find better ways to maintain practices of consumption."

Family Challenges

Sara and her relatives have personally clashed with the national administration over its tightening regulations on animal husbandry. Previously, Sara's brother embarked on a set of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the forced culling of his animals, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara created a extended series of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal drape of four hundred cranial remains, which was exhibited at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the lobby.

Art as Awareness

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