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Guests to Tate Modern are accustomed to unexpected encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an man-made sun, glided down amusement rides, and witnessed robotic sea creatures drifting through the air. But this marks the first time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nasal passages of a reindeer. The latest artistic project for this huge space—developed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a winding design based on the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Upon entering, they can meander around or unwind on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to community leaders telling narratives and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It could seem whimsical, but the exhibit pays tribute to a little-known natural marvel: researchers have discovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it inhales by eighty degrees, enabling the animal to survive in extreme Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "generates a sense of inferiority that you as a individual are not superior over nature." Sara is a former reporter, children's author, and environmental activist, who is from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Possibly that fosters the possibility to change your viewpoint or evoke some modesty," she states.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The maze-like design is among various features in Sara's immersive exhibition honoring the traditions, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They have faced oppression, cultural suppression, and eradication of their dialect by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the work also draws attention to the group's struggles associated with the climate crisis, land dispossession, and external control.

Metaphor in Elements

On the lengthy entry ramp, there's a looming, 26-metre sculpture of reindeer hides entangled by power and light cables. It represents a analogy for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part heavenly staircase, this part of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein dense sheets of ice appear as changing temperatures thaw and ice over the snow, locking in the reindeers' main cold-season nourishment, fungus. This phenomenon is a consequence of global heating, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than in other regions.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they carried carts of animal nutrition on to the exposed Arctic plains to dispense by hand. The herd gathered round us, pawing the slippery ground in futility for vegetative morsels. This expensive and laborious process is having a severe impact on herding practices—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the choice is death. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are perishing—some from hunger, others drowning after sinking in lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the installation is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

The installation also highlights the sharp difference between the industrial understanding of power as a commodity to be utilized for profit and survival and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an innate life force in creatures, people, and land. This venue's past as a fossil fuel plant is connected to this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by regional governments. In their efforts to be standard bearers for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, water power facilities, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and way of life are threatened. "It's challenging being such a small minority to stand your ground when the arguments are based on global sustainability," Sara observes. "Extractivism has adopted the discourse of ecology, but still it's just striving to find alternative ways to persist in practices of use."

Individual Struggles

She and her kin have personally disagreed with the national administration over its ever-stricter policies on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's brother undertook a sequence of finally failed court actions over the forced culling of his animals, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a four-year set of creations called Pile O'Sápmi including a huge screen of four hundred animal bones, which was shown at the the show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the entrance.

The Role of Art in Advocacy

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