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Attendees to Tate Modern are accustomed to surprising experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an man-made sun, glided down helter skelters, and observed robotic sea creatures hovering through the air. But this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this cavernous space—designed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a maze-like design based on the expanded inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Once inside, they can wander around or unwind on reindeer hides, tuning in on headphones to community leaders sharing narratives and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It might seem whimsical, but the installation celebrates a little-known scientific wonder: researchers have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it takes in by eighty degrees, allowing the creature to endure in harsh Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "creates a sense of inferiority that you as a individual are not in control over nature." She is a former journalist, young adult author, and land defender, who hails from a pastoral family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that generates the potential to change your outlook or spark some humility," she adds.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The winding structure is one of several elements in Sara's immersive exhibition celebrating the traditions, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They have endured persecution, cultural suppression, and eradication of their language by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the art also highlights the community's issues connected to the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and external control.

Metaphor in Materials

Along the lengthy access incline, there's a looming, 26-metre sculpture of pelts entangled by utility lines. It represents a metaphor for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part heavenly staircase, this component of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, in which thick sheets of ice develop as varying weather melt and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' main winter sustenance, lichen. The condition is a consequence of climate change, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than globally.

Previously, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and went with Sámi herders on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they transported containers of supplementary feed on to the exposed tundra to dispense by hand. These animals crowded round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain attempts for mossy bits. This costly and labour-intensive process is having a severe impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the alternative is starvation. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are dying—some from starvation, others drowning after plunging into water bodies through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the art is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

The installation also highlights the stark difference between the industrial understanding of power as a commodity to be harnessed for profit and existence and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an natural life force in animals, people, and nature. The gallery's legacy as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be leaders for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of wind energy projects, river barriers, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their legal protections, ways of life, and culture are at risk. "It's hard being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the arguments are rooted in global sustainability," Sara notes. "Extractivism has appropriated the rhetoric of ecology, but yet it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to persist in practices of use."

Personal Challenges

Sara and her relatives have personally disagreed with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent regulations on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's sibling initiated a series of unsuccessful court actions over the forced culling of his animals, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a extended set of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive curtain of four hundred animal bones, which was exhibited at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it hangs in the entrance.

Art as Activism

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