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Visitors to Tate Modern are used to unusual experiences in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have basked under an simulated sun, slid down amusement rides, and witnessed automated sea creatures hovering through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nose cavities of a reindeer. The latest artistic project for this cavernous space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a maze-like construction based on the expanded inside of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Upon entering, they can meander around or relax on skins, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors sharing stories and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why choose the nasal structure? It might seem playful, but the exhibit celebrates a obscure biological feat: experts have found that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it inhales by eighty degrees, helping the animal to survive in harsh Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "generates a feeling of inferiority that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." The artist is a former reporter, children's author, and environmental activist, who hails from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Possibly that fosters the possibility to shift your outlook or spark some modesty," she adds.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The winding installation is among various elements in Sara's absorbing commission honoring the traditions, knowledge, and philosophy of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They've faced persecution, integration policies, and suppression of their dialect by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the work also highlights the community's issues associated with the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Components

On the extended entry ramp, there's a looming, 26-meter sculpture of skins ensnared by electrical wires. It can be read as a analogy for the societal frameworks restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this section of the artwork, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which thick coatings of ice appear as varying temperatures liquefy and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' main winter food, fungus. Goavvi is a outcome of climate change, which is happening up to four times faster in the Arctic than globally.

A few years back, I met with Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they transported containers of animal nutrition on to the barren frozen landscape to provide manually. The herd crowded round us, digging the slippery ground in vain for mossy morsels. This expensive and laborious procedure is having a severe impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the other option is death. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—a number from lack of food, others submerging after falling into water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the art is a tribute to them. "With the layering of materials, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Perspectives

This artwork also underscores the clear difference between the industrial understanding of energy as a commodity to be utilized for gain and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of life force as an innate power in animals, individuals, and land. Tate Modern's legacy as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by Nordic countries. In their efforts to be leaders for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the development of wind energy projects, river barriers, and extraction sites on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their legal protections, ways of life, and traditions are endangered. "It's hard being such a limited population to stand your ground when the arguments are grounded in global sustainability," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has adopted the discourse of ecology, but nonetheless it's just striving to find more suitable ways to persist in habits of use."

Individual Challenges

Sara and her family have personally disagreed with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent regulations on herding. Previously, Sara's sibling embarked on a series of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara produced a extended set of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge drape of numerous animal bones, which was shown at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it hangs in the entryway.

Art as Activism

For many Sámi, visual expression appears the sole domain in which they can be listened to by outsiders. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|