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Attendees to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've basked under an simulated sun, slid down amusement rides, and witnessed automated jellyfish hovering through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be immersing themselves in the detailed nasal chambers of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this cavernous space—developed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a maze-like structure based on the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Once inside, they can stroll around or chill out on reindeer hides, tuning in on headphones to community leaders imparting narratives and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It may seem quirky, but the installation honors a rarely recognized biological feat: researchers have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it breathes in by 80 degrees celsius, allowing the animal to survive in harsh Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "generates a perception of inferiority that you as a person are not dominant over nature." She is a former reporter, young adult author, and rights advocate, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Possibly that creates the potential to alter your perspective or evoke some humility," she adds.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The maze-like design is one of several features in Sara's immersive art project celebrating the traditions, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They've endured persecution, cultural suppression, and eradication of their dialect by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the installation also draws attention to the community's struggles associated with the environmental emergency, property rights, and external control.

Metaphor in Materials

Along the lengthy entrance ramp, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot sculpture of pelts entangled by power and light cables. It represents a metaphor for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this component of the exhibit, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein thick sheets of ice develop as varying conditions thaw and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' primary cold-season sustenance, lichen. The condition is a outcome of planetary warming, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than elsewhere.

Previously, I met with Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they transported carts of food pellets on to the exposed frozen landscape to distribute through labor. These animals gathered round us, digging the slippery ground in vain attempts for lichen-covered morsels. This costly and labour-intensive procedure is having a significant impact on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the other option is malnutrition. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—some from starvation, others submerging after sinking in lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the installation is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Perspectives

This artwork also emphasizes the stark contrast between the industrial interpretation of electricity as a asset to be harnessed for profit and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of energy as an innate power in creatures, humans, and land. Tate Modern's legacy as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by Nordic countries. While attempting to be leaders for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and culture are threatened. "It's challenging being such a limited population to defend yourself when the reasons are rooted in global sustainability," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the language of sustainability, but yet it's just attempting to find alternative ways to persist in habits of consumption."

Personal Conflicts

Sara and her family have personally conflicted with the national administration over its ever-stricter regulations on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's brother undertook a sequence of unsuccessful court actions over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara created a extended set of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge screen of numerous animal bones, which was displayed at the 2017 event Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it is displayed in the lobby.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

Among the community, visual expression appears the only domain in which they can be understood by the global community. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|