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Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an simulated sun, glided down helter skelters, and seen robotic jellyfish drifting through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the detailed nasal passages of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages patrons into a labyrinthine construction inspired by the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nasal passages. Once inside, they can wander around or chill out on skins, tuning in on earphones to community leaders imparting narratives and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It might sound quirky, but the installation pays tribute to a obscure scientific wonder: experts have found that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it takes in by eighty degrees, allowing the creature to thrive in harsh Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "generates a perception of insignificance that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." The artist is a ex- journalist, children's author, and environmental activist, who is from a pastoral family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that fosters the chance to change your perspective or evoke some modesty," she states.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The maze-like design is one of several components in Sara's absorbing exhibition showcasing the heritage, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi count about 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They have experienced persecution, integration policies, and repression of their dialect by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the art also spotlights the community's challenges relating to the global warming, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Materials

Along the long entrance slope, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot formation of skins entangled by utility lines. It serves as a symbol for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this part of the artwork, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby solid sheets of ice form as fluctuating conditions liquefy and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' primary winter food, lichen. This phenomenon is a outcome of climate change, which is happening up to four times faster in the Polar region than globally.

A few years back, I met with Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they transported containers of animal nutrition on to the barren frozen landscape to provide by hand. The reindeer gathered round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain attempts for vegetative pieces. This expensive and laborious process is having a severe impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the alternative is starvation. As goavvi winters become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—some from lack of food, others suffocating after plunging into streams through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the installation is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Perspectives

This artwork also underscores the clear divergence between the modern view of energy as a commodity to be exploited for profit and existence and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an inherent power in animals, humans, and nature. This venue's history as a fossil fuel plant is connected to this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be leaders for sustainable power, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the development of wind energy projects, river barriers, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their human rights, ways of life, and culture are endangered. "It's challenging being such a small minority to stand your ground when the arguments are rooted in global sustainability," Sara notes. "Extractivism has adopted the rhetoric of ecology, but still it's just striving to find more suitable ways to maintain habits of consumption."

Family Struggles

Sara and her relatives have themselves disagreed with the state authorities over its tightening regulations on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's sibling undertook a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the required reduction of his livestock, supposedly to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara created a multi-year set of creations called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive screen of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was shown at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it is displayed in the lobby.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

For many Sámi, art seems the sole realm in which they can be listened to by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|