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Attendees to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have basked under an artificial sun, glided down spiral slides, and seen automated sea creatures floating through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nose passages of a reindeer. The latest artistic project for this cavernous space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages patrons into a winding structure based on the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Upon entering, they can wander around or unwind on skins, listening on headphones to Sámi elders sharing narratives and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It might appear quirky, but the installation celebrates a rarely recognized natural marvel: experts have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it inhales by 80°C, allowing the animal to survive in extreme Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "creates a feeling of inferiority that you as a person are not dominant over nature." She is a ex- reporter, young adult author, and land defender, who is from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that fosters the potential to shift your perspective or spark some modesty," she continues.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The maze-like structure is part of a components in Sara's absorbing exhibition honoring the heritage, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number roughly 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They have endured persecution, forced assimilation, and repression of their tongue by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the art also draws attention to the people's issues associated with the climate crisis, land dispossession, and external control.

Symbolism in Materials

Along the lengthy entrance ramp, there's a towering, 26-meter structure of pelts trapped by electrical wires. It can be read as a symbol for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part heavenly staircase, this part of the artwork, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, wherein solid sheets of ice develop as changing weather liquefy and ice over the snow, locking in the reindeers' key cold-season sustenance, moss. This phenomenon is a outcome of global heating, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a icy season and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they hauled trailers of food pellets on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to distribute manually. The herd surrounded round us, scratching the frozen ground in futility for lichen-covered bits. This expensive and laborious method is having a severe impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the choice is malnutrition. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are perishing—some from lack of food, others submerging after sinking in streams through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the installation is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

This artwork also highlights the clear divergence between the modern interpretation of energy as a asset to be harnessed for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an inherent essence in creatures, humans, and land. The gallery's past as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be exemplars for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, river barriers, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, livelihoods, and culture are at risk. "It's hard being such a limited population to defend yourself when the reasons are based on environmental protection," Sara comments. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the rhetoric of sustainability, but yet it's just attempting to find better ways to persist in patterns of use."

Family Conflicts

Sara and her kin have themselves disagreed with the Norwegian government over its tightening rules on animal husbandry. Previously, Sara's sibling embarked on a sequence of unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara created a four-year series of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi including a massive curtain of four hundred animal bones, which was exhibited at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it resides in the entryway.

Art as Activism

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