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Guests to Tate Modern are accustomed to surprising encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have basked under an man-made sun, glided down helter skelters, and observed automated sea creatures hovering through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this immense space—created by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a labyrinthine construction based on the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nasal passages. Once inside, they can wander around or unwind on pelts, listening on earphones to community leaders imparting tales and insights.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why the nose? It may seem whimsical, but the artwork celebrates a rarely recognized biological feat: researchers have discovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it breathes in by 80°C, enabling the creature to endure in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "creates a sense of insignificance that you as a person are not in control over nature." The artist is a former journalist, young adult author, and land defender, who hails from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that creates the potential to alter your viewpoint or trigger some humbleness," she states.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The labyrinthine structure is part of a features in Sara's absorbing commission honoring the heritage, knowledge, and philosophy of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number about 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They have endured oppression, forced assimilation, and eradication of their dialect by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the art also highlights the community's challenges associated with the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and external control.

Symbolism in Materials

Along the extended entrance slope, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot structure of skins ensnared by utility lines. It can be read as a symbol for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this component of the artwork, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, whereby solid sheets of ice develop as fluctuating temperatures thaw and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary winter sustenance, moss. The condition is a outcome of climate change, which is taking place up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than globally.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in freezing temperatures as they carried trailers of supplementary feed on to the exposed tundra to dispense manually. These animals surrounded round us, scratching the frozen ground in vain for mossy morsels. This expensive and labour-intensive process is having a severe influence on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. However the choice is death. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are perishing—some from hunger, others submerging after sinking in lakes and rivers through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the work is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Perspectives

This artwork also highlights the clear contrast between the western view of power as a asset to be exploited for gain and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of life force as an inherent life force in animals, individuals, and land. This venue's past as a coal and oil power station is connected to this, as is what the Sámi consider eco-imperialism by Nordic countries. In their efforts to be leaders for sustainable power, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their traditional territory; the Sámi contend their legal protections, livelihoods, and culture are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a tiny group to stand your ground when the reasons are grounded in saving the world," Sara comments. "Mining practices has co-opted the language of ecology, but yet it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to continue patterns of expenditure."

Individual Challenges

Sara and her relatives have themselves conflicted with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter regulations on herding. A few years ago, Sara's sibling undertook a sequence of finally failed court actions over the required reduction of his herd, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara created a four-year collection of creations called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal curtain of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it is displayed in the entrance.

Art as Advocacy

Among the community, art seems the exclusive realm in which they can be understood by outsiders. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|