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Attendees to Tate Modern are familiar to unexpected displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an man-made sun, descended down spiral slides, and witnessed robotic jellyfish hovering through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the complex nasal passages of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this cavernous space—developed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a maze-like design based on the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Once inside, they can stroll around or relax on pelts, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors imparting tales and wisdom.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It could seem playful, but the artwork pays tribute to a obscure biological feat: experts have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the surrounding air it takes in by eighty degrees, allowing the creature to endure in extreme Arctic climates. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara explains, "generates a perception of smallness that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." Sara is a former reporter, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who is from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that creates the possibility to alter your viewpoint or spark some modesty," she continues.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The winding structure is among various features in Sara's engaging exhibition honoring the traditions, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They have experienced oppression, integration policies, and eradication of their language by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the work also draws attention to the people's challenges associated with the climate crisis, loss of territory, and external control.

Metaphor in Components

At the long entrance ramp, there's a towering, 26-metre formation of reindeer hides entangled by utility lines. It serves as a analogy for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this part of the artwork, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which solid coatings of ice form as fluctuating temperatures thaw and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary winter nourishment, moss. Goavvi is a outcome of global heating, which is taking place up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than globally.

Three years ago, I met with Sara in a remote town during a icy season and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they hauled containers of food pellets on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to dispense manually. The reindeer crowded round us, scratching the frozen ground in futility for vegetative bits. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive procedure is having a severe impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the alternative is malnutrition. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—some from starvation, others drowning after falling into lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. In a sense, the work is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

The installation also underscores the clear contrast between the industrial interpretation of energy as a resource to be exploited for gain and survival and the Sámi outlook of energy as an inherent power in animals, humans, and nature. Tate Modern's history as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by regional governments. As they strive to be standard bearers for clean sources, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, river barriers, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi contend their fundamental freedoms, livelihoods, and way of life are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to protect your rights when the justifications are grounded in saving the world," Sara comments. "Resource exploitation has adopted the language of environmentalism, but still it's just aiming to find better ways to continue habits of expenditure."

Individual Challenges

She and her family have themselves disagreed with the state authorities over its tightening policies on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's brother undertook a series of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the required reduction of his livestock, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara created a four-year set of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive curtain of four hundred animal bones, which was shown at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it is displayed in the lobby.

Art as Advocacy

For many Sámi, visual expression appears the exclusive domain in which they can be heard by the global community. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|