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Attendees to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an simulated sun, slid down helter skelters, and seen robotic sea creatures hovering through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the complex nasal cavities of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this huge space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a maze-like structure inspired by the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Once inside, they can stroll around or relax on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to community leaders imparting narratives and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It might seem playful, but the exhibit celebrates a little-known biological feat: experts have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, helping the creature to survive in extreme Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "creates a sense of inferiority that you as a individual are not in control over nature." She is a former writer, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who is from a herding family in northern Norway. "Maybe that fosters the chance to shift your outlook or evoke some modesty," she adds.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The winding design is one of several components in Sara's immersive exhibition showcasing the traditions, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total about 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They have endured discrimination, cultural suppression, and eradication of their tongue by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the art also spotlights the community's challenges relating to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Elements

At the lengthy entrance ramp, there's a towering, eighty-five-foot structure of reindeer hides ensnared by electrical wires. It serves as a analogy for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this component of the artwork, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, whereby solid sheets of ice form as fluctuating weather melt and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' primary cold-season sustenance, lichen. Goavvi is a result of planetary warming, which is happening up to much more rapidly 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 herders on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they transported containers of supplementary feed on to the barren tundra to provide through labor. These animals gathered round us, scratching the slippery ground in vain for vegetative pieces. This resource-intensive and laborious procedure is having a significant impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. Yet the other option is starvation. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are dying—some from hunger, others drowning after falling into water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the art is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

The installation also underscores the sharp divergence between the western understanding of electricity as a resource to be exploited for profit and survival and the Sámi worldview of life force as an inherent life force in creatures, individuals, and nature. The gallery's history as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by regional governments. As they strive to be standard bearers for clean sources, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their human rights, incomes, and culture are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to protect your rights when the arguments are grounded in environmental protection," Sara observes. "Mining practices has appropriated the discourse of ecology, but yet it's just striving to find alternative ways to maintain habits of use."

Family Struggles

Sara and her family have personally disagreed with the Norwegian government over its tightening policies on herding. In 2016, Sara's brother embarked on a set of ultimately unsuccessful court actions over the forced culling of his livestock, apparently to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a four-year collection of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge screen of numerous reindeer skulls, which was shown at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the entrance.

The Role of Art in Activism

For many Sámi, visual expression is 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|