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Guests to Tate Modern are familiar to surprising encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have basked under an artificial sun, descended down amusement rides, and observed automated sea creatures hovering through the air. But this marks the first time they will be venturing themselves in the complex nose chambers of a reindeer. The current artist commission for this cavernous space—created by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a labyrinthine structure based on the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Inside, they can stroll around or chill out on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to Sámi elders imparting narratives and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It might sound whimsical, but the artwork honors a obscure biological feat: experts have discovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the surrounding air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, helping the animal to thrive in inhospitable Arctic climates. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara explains, "creates a perception of smallness that you as a person are not in control over nature." Sara is a former journalist, children's author, and land defender, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that creates the potential to alter your outlook or evoke some humbleness," she adds.

A Celebration to Indigenous Heritage

The maze-like design is part of a components in Sara's engaging art project honoring the traditions, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count about 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They have endured discrimination, forced assimilation, and suppression of their dialect by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the installation also highlights the group's issues relating to the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and external control.

Meaning in Materials

On the extended entry ramp, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot structure of skins trapped by power and light cables. It serves as a symbol for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this part of the artwork, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi name for an harsh environmental condition, in which solid layers of ice develop as fluctuating weather liquefy and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' main winter nourishment, fungus. Goavvi is a result of planetary warming, which is happening up to four times faster in the Far North than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they hauled trailers of food pellets on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to dispense through labor. The reindeer gathered round us, pawing the slippery ground in futility for vegetative bits. This costly and labour-intensive method is having a significant effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. However the choice is malnutrition. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—a number from starvation, others drowning after falling into streams through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the art is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Perspectives

This artwork also emphasizes the sharp difference between the western interpretation of energy as a commodity to be exploited for profit and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of life force as an inherent life force in animals, people, and the environment. Tate Modern's past as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by regional governments. In their efforts to be exemplars for renewable energy, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the construction of windfarms, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi contend their human rights, ways of life, and culture are endangered. "It's hard being such a tiny group to stand your ground when the justifications are based on environmental protection," Sara comments. "Extractivism has adopted the language of sustainability, but still it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to persist in habits of expenditure."

Family Challenges

Sara and her kin have themselves disagreed with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter rules on herding. Previously, Sara's brother embarked on a set of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the required reduction of his herd, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara developed a four-year series of creations called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive curtain of numerous cranial remains, which was exhibited at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the entrance.

Art as Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work seems the sole sphere in which they can be understood by the global community. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|