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Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to unexpected encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've basked under an artificial sun, descended down spiral slides, and witnessed AI-powered sea creatures drifting through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nasal cavities of a reindeer. The latest artistic project for this huge space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a winding structure modeled after the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose passages. Once inside, they can wander around or chill out on pelts, listening on earphones to Sámi elders sharing stories and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It might appear quirky, but the installation celebrates a obscure scientific wonder: researchers have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the ambient air it breathes in by eighty degrees, helping the creature to survive in harsh Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara notes, "produces a perception of smallness that you as a human being are not in control over nature." She is a ex- journalist, young adult author, and land defender, who is from a pastoral family in northern Norway. "Maybe that creates the potential to change your outlook or spark some humility," she continues.

A Celebration to Indigenous Heritage

The winding structure is one of several features in Sara's absorbing commission honoring the culture, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They have experienced discrimination, integration policies, and repression of their tongue by all four nations. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the art also spotlights the community's challenges associated with the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Elements

At the long entrance incline, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot structure of pelts trapped by utility lines. It serves as a metaphor for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part heavenly staircase, this part of the installation, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, in which dense sheets of ice appear as fluctuating conditions melt and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' main cold-season sustenance, lichen. This phenomenon is a outcome of global heating, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Far North than globally.

Previously, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and went with Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they hauled containers of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured tundra to provide by hand. The herd gathered round us, scratching the slippery ground in vain for lichen-covered morsels. This resource-intensive and laborious method is having a severe impact on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. But the other option is malnutrition. As these icy periods become routine, reindeer are dying—some from hunger, others suffocating after sinking in streams through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the art is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

The sculpture also underscores the clear divergence between the industrial understanding of power as a resource to be harnessed for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an natural power in creatures, humans, and the environment. The gallery's legacy as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be leaders for clean sources, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, river barriers, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi assert their legal protections, ways of life, and traditions are endangered. "It's hard being such a small minority to protect your rights when the justifications are grounded in global sustainability," Sara observes. "Extractivism has co-opted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but still it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to continue habits of consumption."

Individual Challenges

The artist and her kin have personally conflicted with the national administration over its increasingly stringent policies on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's sibling undertook a series of ultimately unsuccessful court actions over the forced culling of his herd, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara produced a extended collection of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi including a massive drape of numerous cranial remains, which was exhibited at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

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