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Attendees to Tate Modern are familiar to unexpected displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've basked under an man-made sun, descended down helter skelters, and seen robotic jellyfish floating through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the complex nose chambers of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this cavernous space—designed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a labyrinthine construction inspired by the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Once inside, they can wander around or unwind on skins, tuning in on headphones to Sámi elders imparting tales and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It might seem playful, but the installation pays tribute to a obscure biological feat: researchers have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it inhales by 80°C, allowing the animal to endure in extreme Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "generates a feeling of smallness that you as a human being are not superior over nature." The artist is a ex- reporter, writer for kids, and land defender, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Maybe that generates the chance to change your perspective or trigger some modesty," she continues.

A Tribute to Traditional Ways

The maze-like installation is among various components in Sara's engaging exhibition showcasing the culture, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They have endured oppression, forced assimilation, and suppression of their language by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the installation also spotlights the people's struggles relating to the climate crisis, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Materials

At the lengthy entry incline, there's a towering, eighty-five-foot formation of skins trapped by utility lines. It serves as a symbol for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part spiritual ascent, this component of the artwork, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, in which solid sheets of ice appear as changing temperatures melt and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' main winter sustenance, fungus. The condition is a result of climate change, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Far North than globally.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi herders on their motorized sleds in freezing temperatures as they carried trailers of supplementary feed on to the barren tundra to dispense by hand. These animals surrounded round us, pawing the frozen ground in futility for lichen-covered bits. This expensive and laborious process is having a drastic impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. However the alternative is death. As goavvi winters become frequent, reindeer are perishing—some from starvation, others submerging after plunging into lakes and rivers through prematurely melting ice. To some extent, the art is a monument to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

This artwork also underscores the sharp contrast between the modern interpretation of electricity as a commodity to be exploited for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an natural essence in creatures, humans, and nature. The gallery's history as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be leaders for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi argue their human rights, livelihoods, and culture are at risk. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to defend yourself when the reasons are rooted in saving the world," Sara comments. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the discourse of environmentalism, but still it's just aiming to find alternative ways to continue patterns of consumption."

Individual Challenges

Sara and her family have themselves clashed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent policies on herding. A few years ago, Sara's brother undertook a set of unsuccessful court actions over the required reduction of his animals, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara produced a multi-year collection of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive curtain of 400 cranial remains, which was shown at the 2017 event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it hangs in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Activism

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