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Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to surprising encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an artificial sun, glided down helter skelters, and seen robotic jellyfish floating through the air. But this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nasal chambers of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this immense space—designed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a winding design inspired by the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nasal passages. Once inside, they can wander around or relax on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to tribal seniors imparting stories and knowledge.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It might sound quirky, but the installation honors a rarely recognized scientific wonder: experts have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it inhales by 80 degrees celsius, allowing the animal to thrive in extreme Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "generates a feeling of smallness that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." She is a ex- journalist, young adult author, and land defender, who is from a pastoral family in northern Norway. "Maybe that fosters the chance to alter your perspective or trigger some modesty," she continues.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The maze-like design is part of a elements in Sara's immersive exhibition celebrating the culture, understanding, and philosophy of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They've faced oppression, integration policies, and repression of their tongue by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the art also spotlights the community's challenges relating to the global warming, property rights, and colonialism.

Meaning in Materials

At the lengthy entry incline, there's a towering, eighty-five-foot structure of reindeer hides entangled by electrical wires. It serves as a analogy for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this section of the artwork, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which solid sheets of ice form as changing temperatures melt and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' main winter nourishment, lichen. The condition is a result of planetary warming, which is taking place up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than globally.

Three years ago, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in freezing temperatures as they hauled trailers of food pellets on to the exposed frozen landscape to dispense through labor. These animals surrounded round us, scratching the icy ground in vain attempts for mossy pieces. This resource-intensive and demanding process is having a severe impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. However the alternative is death. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are succumbing—some from starvation, others drowning after plunging into streams through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the work is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm introducing the condition to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

This artwork also highlights the sharp divergence between the modern understanding of electricity as a asset to be exploited for gain and survival and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an innate power in creatures, people, and the environment. The gallery's history as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be standard bearers for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have clashed with the Sámi over the development of windfarms, river barriers, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their legal protections, ways of life, and way of life are at risk. "It's challenging being such a limited population to defend yourself when the reasons are rooted in global sustainability," Sara observes. "Mining practices has co-opted the language of sustainability, but nonetheless it's just striving to find alternative ways to maintain patterns of consumption."

Personal Challenges

The artist and her family have themselves clashed with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter regulations on herding. A few years ago, Sara's sibling initiated a sequence of unsuccessful court actions over the forced culling of his animals, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara created a multi-year series of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi featuring a colossal curtain of numerous animal bones, which was displayed at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later purchased by the public gallery, where it resides in the lobby.

Art as Advocacy

For many Sámi, creative work appears the only domain in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|