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Attendees to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They have basked under an artificial sun, descended down spiral slides, and seen AI-powered jellyfish floating through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the detailed nasal cavities of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this cavernous space—developed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a maze-like construction based on the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose cavities. Inside, they can stroll around or chill out on reindeer hides, tuning in on earphones to Sámi elders telling tales and knowledge.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why the nose? It may appear playful, but the artwork honors a little-known natural marvel: scientists have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it takes in by 80°C, enabling the animal to endure in harsh Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "generates a perception of inferiority that you as a human being are not in control over nature." The artist is a former reporter, children's author, and environmental activist, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Possibly that creates the potential to shift your outlook or spark some modesty," she adds.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The winding structure is among various elements in Sara's engaging exhibition showcasing the heritage, science, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi count about 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They've experienced persecution, cultural suppression, and repression of their dialect by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the work also highlights the community's struggles connected to the climate crisis, land dispossession, and external control.

Metaphor in Materials

At the lengthy access slope, there's a soaring, 26-meter sculpture of reindeer hides entangled by power and light cables. It represents a symbol for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this component of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an severe climatic event, whereby thick layers of ice develop as fluctuating weather liquefy and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' main cold-season food, fungus. This phenomenon is a outcome of climate change, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than elsewhere.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and joined Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they carried carts of animal nutrition on to the barren frozen landscape to distribute by hand. The reindeer crowded round us, scratching the frozen ground in vain for mossy bits. This costly and laborious procedure is having a severe influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. Yet the other option is starvation. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—some from starvation, others suffocating after falling into streams through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the installation is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

The installation also underscores the clear difference between the western interpretation of energy as a asset to be exploited for profit and existence and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an innate power in animals, humans, and nature. The gallery's legacy as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by Nordic countries. As they strive to be exemplars for sustainable power, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the building of windfarms, river barriers, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their legal protections, livelihoods, and culture are threatened. "It's hard being such a tiny group to protect your rights when the justifications are grounded in global sustainability," Sara comments. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the language of ecology, but yet it's just striving to find alternative ways to continue practices of expenditure."

Individual Challenges

Sara and her relatives have personally conflicted with the national administration over its increasingly stringent rules on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's sibling undertook a series of unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara created a multi-year set of creations called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal curtain of four hundred animal bones, which was displayed at the 2017 event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the national institution, where it resides in the lobby.

Art as Activism

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