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Attendees to Tate Modern are used to unexpected encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They have basked under an man-made sun, descended down amusement rides, and seen automated sea creatures floating through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nose passages of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this cavernous space—designed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages patrons into a labyrinthine structure inspired by the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nasal passages. Once inside, they can wander around or relax on reindeer hides, tuning in on headphones to community leaders telling narratives and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It might appear playful, but the installation pays tribute to a little-known natural marvel: researchers have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it inhales by 80°C, allowing the creature to endure in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "generates a sense of inferiority that you as a individual are not in control over nature." The artist is a former journalist, children's author, and environmental activist, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that fosters the chance to change your outlook or trigger some humility," she states.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The labyrinthine installation is part of a components in Sara's absorbing commission honoring the heritage, knowledge, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They've faced discrimination, integration policies, and repression of their dialect by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the art also highlights the group's issues connected to the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and external control.

Meaning in Components

Along the long entry ramp, there's a soaring, 26-metre sculpture of pelts entangled by power and light cables. It can be read as a metaphor for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part heavenly staircase, this section of the artwork, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby solid sheets of ice appear as changing weather liquefy and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary winter nourishment, moss. The condition is a consequence of planetary warming, which is happening up to four times faster in the Arctic than globally.

Previously, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they hauled trailers of animal nutrition on to the exposed frozen landscape to distribute manually. These animals surrounded round us, pawing the slippery ground in futility for vegetative pieces. This expensive and demanding process is having a drastic influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. However the other option is death. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are dying—some from hunger, others suffocating after plunging into water bodies through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the work is a tribute to them. "With the layering of materials, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Perspectives

The installation also highlights the stark difference between the industrial interpretation of power as a resource to be utilized for gain and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of life force as an natural essence in creatures, people, and land. Tate Modern's past as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be leaders for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, water power facilities, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their human rights, ways of life, and way of life are threatened. "It's hard being such a tiny group to stand your ground when the reasons are based on saving the world," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the rhetoric of ecology, but yet it's just aiming to find better ways to maintain patterns of use."

Personal Struggles

The artist and her kin have themselves conflicted with the state authorities over its tightening rules on animal husbandry. Previously, Sara's sibling undertook a set of ultimately unsuccessful court actions over the forced culling of his animals, supposedly to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a four-year collection of creations named Pile O'Sápmi including a massive curtain of numerous cranial remains, which was exhibited at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it hangs in the lobby.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

For many Sámi, creative work appears the exclusive realm in which they can be understood by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|