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Guests to Tate Modern are familiar to surprising displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an artificial sun, descended down helter skelters, and observed robotic sea creatures floating through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the detailed nasal chambers of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this cavernous space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a winding design modeled after the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nasal airways. Inside, they can stroll around or unwind on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to Sámi elders imparting narratives and wisdom.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It might seem whimsical, but the installation celebrates a rarely recognized biological feat: experts have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, helping the creature to thrive in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "produces a feeling of insignificance that you as a person are not dominant over nature." She is a former journalist, young adult author, and environmental activist, who is from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that creates the possibility to change your viewpoint or spark some modesty," she adds.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The labyrinthine design is among various components in Sara's immersive commission celebrating the culture, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They've faced persecution, forced assimilation, and eradication of their language by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the work also spotlights the group's issues relating to the climate crisis, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Elements

On the lengthy access ramp, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot sculpture of reindeer hides ensnared by utility lines. It can be read as a analogy for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this component of the artwork, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an severe climatic event, in which solid sheets of ice appear as fluctuating temperatures liquefy and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary winter food, fungus. This phenomenon is a consequence of planetary warming, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I met with Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they carried carts of supplementary feed on to the exposed Arctic plains to provide by hand. The reindeer crowded round us, digging the icy ground in vain attempts for vegetative morsels. This expensive and laborious procedure is having a drastic effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. However the choice is starvation. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are dying—a number from hunger, others suffocating after falling into lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the installation is a memorial to them. "With the layering of elements, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Perspectives

This artwork also emphasizes the stark contrast between the western understanding of electricity as a commodity to be exploited for profit and survival and the Sámi outlook of life force as an natural power in creatures, humans, and land. Tate Modern's past as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by regional governments. In their efforts to be standard bearers for renewable energy, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, river barriers, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi assert their legal protections, incomes, and way of life are at risk. "It's hard being such a small minority to stand your ground when the arguments are grounded in saving the world," Sara observes. "Mining practices has appropriated the rhetoric of ecology, but still it's just aiming to find better ways to continue practices of expenditure."

Family Struggles

The artist and her relatives have personally conflicted with the national administration over its increasingly stringent policies on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's brother embarked on a series of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the required reduction of his herd, supposedly to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara developed a multi-year collection of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive screen of numerous animal bones, which was shown at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the national institution, where it is displayed in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, art is the only domain in which they can be understood by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|