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Guests to Tate Modern are accustomed to surprising encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an artificial sun, glided down amusement rides, and witnessed AI-powered sea creatures floating through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nasal passages of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this immense space—developed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a maze-like design inspired by the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nose passages. Upon entering, they can wander around or relax on skins, listening on earphones to tribal seniors imparting narratives and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It could seem whimsical, but the artwork celebrates a rarely recognized natural marvel: scientists have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the ambient air it breathes in by eighty degrees, enabling the animal to thrive in inhospitable Arctic climates. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara notes, "creates a sense of inferiority that you as a person are not superior over nature." The artist is a former writer, young adult author, and land defender, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Maybe that generates the potential to shift your perspective or evoke some humbleness," she states.

An Homage to Indigenous Heritage

The winding installation is part of a elements in Sara's absorbing art project honoring the traditions, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number roughly 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They've experienced discrimination, forced assimilation, and suppression of their language by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi belief system and founding narrative, the installation also highlights the community's challenges associated with the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and external control.

Symbolism in Elements

At the extended entry ramp, there's a soaring, 26-meter formation of skins entangled by electrical wires. It represents a analogy for the societal frameworks constraining the Sámi. Part pylon, part spiritual ascent, this part of the installation, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, in which thick layers of ice develop as fluctuating temperatures thaw and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary winter nourishment, moss. The condition is a consequence of planetary warming, which is happening up to four times faster in the Polar region than elsewhere.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they transported containers of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured tundra to distribute by hand. The herd surrounded round us, pawing the frozen ground in vain for vegetative pieces. This resource-intensive and demanding procedure is having a severe effect on herding practices—and on the animals' natural survival. However the choice is starvation. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are perishing—a number from starvation, others drowning after plunging into water bodies through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the installation is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm introducing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

This artwork also highlights the stark difference between the western understanding of electricity as a resource to be utilized for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi outlook of life force as an inherent power in creatures, individuals, and nature. Tate Modern's history as a fossil fuel plant is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by regional governments. As they strive to be leaders for renewable energy, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, river barriers, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi assert their legal protections, livelihoods, and way of life are endangered. "It's challenging being such a limited population to stand your ground when the justifications are rooted in environmental protection," Sara notes. "Extractivism has adopted the language of ecology, but yet it's just aiming to find better ways to maintain patterns of use."

Family Struggles

She and her relatives have themselves clashed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent regulations on herding. A few years ago, Sara's brother initiated a sequence of unsuccessful legal cases over the forced culling of his livestock, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara developed a extended collection of creations named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a colossal screen of numerous cranial remains, which was exhibited at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the lobby.

Creative Expression as Activism

For many Sámi, creative work appears the exclusive sphere in which they can be understood by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|