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Visitors to Tate Modern are accustomed to unexpected displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've basked under an artificial sun, slid down spiral slides, and seen AI-powered sea creatures floating through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nasal passages of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this huge space—developed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a maze-like design based on the expanded inside of a reindeer's nasal airways. Once inside, they can stroll around or chill out on pelts, tuning in on headphones to community leaders sharing tales and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why choose the nasal structure? It could seem quirky, but the installation celebrates a rarely recognized biological feat: experts have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it takes in by eighty degrees, enabling the animal to thrive in extreme Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara notes, "creates a feeling of insignificance that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." The artist is a former journalist, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who is from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that generates the possibility to alter your perspective or spark some humility," she states.

A Celebration to Indigenous Heritage

The winding design is part of a features in Sara's immersive art project showcasing the culture, science, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi total roughly 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, integration policies, and suppression of their language by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the art also spotlights the group's issues connected to the global warming, property rights, and colonialism.

Meaning in Components

On the extended entrance incline, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot structure of skins entangled by power and light cables. It can be read as a metaphor for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this section of the installation, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which solid coatings of ice develop as changing weather thaw and ice over the snow, locking in the reindeers' primary winter food, moss. The condition is a consequence of planetary warming, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Far North than globally.

Previously, I visited Sara in a remote town during a icy season and went with Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in freezing temperatures as they carried carts of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to distribute by hand. The reindeer gathered round us, pawing the frozen ground in futility for mossy bits. This expensive and laborious process is having a severe influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. But the other option is death. As these icy periods become frequent, reindeer are perishing—some from starvation, others suffocating after falling into lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the art is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

This artwork also emphasizes the clear difference between the modern interpretation of energy as a commodity to be utilized for profit and existence and the Sámi worldview of life force as an natural essence in animals, people, and the environment. The gallery's history as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi consider eco-imperialism by Nordic countries. In their efforts to be leaders for sustainable power, these states have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, water power facilities, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their legal protections, ways of life, and culture are threatened. "It's hard being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the arguments are based on saving the world," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the language of ecology, but yet it's just attempting to find better ways to continue patterns of use."

Individual Challenges

Sara and her relatives have themselves clashed with the Norwegian government over its tightening rules on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's sibling embarked on a series of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the forced culling of his animals, apparently to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara produced a multi-year collection of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal curtain of 400 cranial remains, which was shown at the 2017 event Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the lobby.

Art as Activism

For many Sámi, creative work seems the sole sphere in which they can be listened to by outsiders. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|