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Attendees to Tate Modern are accustomed to unusual displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an man-made sun, descended down helter skelters, and seen robotic sea creatures drifting through the air. But this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nose passages of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this cavernous space—developed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a winding structure based on the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Upon entering, they can wander around or unwind on pelts, tuning in on headphones to community leaders imparting stories and wisdom.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It may appear playful, but the artwork honors a little-known scientific wonder: researchers have discovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, allowing the creature to endure in extreme Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "generates a perception of insignificance that you as a individual are not superior over nature." Sara is a former writer, young adult author, and land defender, who comes from a pastoral family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that generates the possibility to alter your viewpoint or trigger some humility," she adds.

A Celebration to Indigenous Heritage

The labyrinthine installation is part of a features in Sara's immersive art project honoring the traditions, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They have experienced oppression, integration policies, and suppression of their dialect by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the installation also spotlights the group's challenges relating to the environmental emergency, property rights, and colonialism.

Meaning in Elements

Along the extended access ramp, there's a looming, 26-metre formation of reindeer hides trapped by power and light cables. It serves as a analogy for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this component of the installation, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an harsh environmental condition, wherein dense layers of ice form as varying weather liquefy and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' main winter food, fungus. Goavvi is a consequence of global heating, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a icy season and went with Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they hauled carts of food pellets on to the wind-scoured tundra to distribute manually. The herd surrounded round us, digging the icy ground in vain for mossy morsels. This resource-intensive and laborious method is having a severe influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. But the other option is starvation. As these icy periods become frequent, reindeer are dying—some from starvation, others drowning after falling into streams through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the installation is a monument to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

The installation also emphasizes the clear difference between the western interpretation of electricity as a resource to be harnessed for gain and survival and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an innate power in creatures, people, and land. The gallery's past as a fossil fuel plant is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by regional governments. While attempting to be standard bearers for renewable energy, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, livelihoods, and way of life are endangered. "It's hard being such a limited population to protect your rights when the arguments are rooted in saving the world," Sara observes. "Mining practices has co-opted the language of environmentalism, but yet it's just attempting to find better ways to maintain practices of use."

Personal Challenges

The artist and her kin have themselves conflicted with the national administration over its ever-stricter rules on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's sibling initiated a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the forced culling of his livestock, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a four-year collection of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi including a huge curtain of numerous reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the the event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the entryway.

The Role of Art in Advocacy

For many Sámi, visual expression is the only domain in which they can be heard by people of other nations. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|