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Attendees to Tate Modern are used to surprising experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They have basked under an man-made sun, slid down amusement rides, and witnessed automated sea creatures drifting through the air. However this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nasal chambers of a reindeer. The current artist commission for this huge space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes patrons into a maze-like construction inspired by the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nasal passages. Once inside, they can meander around or relax on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to community leaders imparting stories and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

Why choose the nasal structure? It might sound whimsical, but the installation pays tribute to a rarely recognized scientific wonder: researchers have discovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it breathes in by 80°C, helping the animal to endure in extreme Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "produces a feeling of insignificance that you as a individual are not superior over nature." The artist is a ex- journalist, young adult author, and land defender, who comes from a herding family in northern Norway. "Maybe that creates the potential to shift your viewpoint or evoke some humbleness," she adds.

A Tribute to Indigenous Heritage

The winding design is among various features in Sara's engaging commission honoring the culture, knowledge, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They've endured persecution, integration policies, and suppression of their language by all four states. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi belief system and founding narrative, the work also draws attention to the group's struggles relating to the climate crisis, loss of territory, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Materials

Along the lengthy entry slope, there's a soaring, 26-meter structure of skins trapped by utility lines. It serves as a metaphor for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part spiritual ascent, this part of the installation, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, wherein thick sheets of ice develop as fluctuating temperatures thaw and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' main cold-season nourishment, lichen. This phenomenon is a result of planetary warming, which is taking place up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than in other regions.

Previously, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi herders on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they transported carts of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to distribute by hand. The herd surrounded round us, digging the icy ground in futility for mossy morsels. This costly and demanding method is having a drastic influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the other option is death. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are dying—a number from starvation, others drowning after sinking in streams through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the work is a monument to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

The installation also emphasizes the stark difference between the industrial view of energy as a resource to be utilized for profit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an inherent life force in animals, humans, and land. The gallery's legacy as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by regional governments. While attempting to be standard bearers for renewable energy, these states have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and way of life are at risk. "It's challenging being such a limited population to protect your rights when the reasons are grounded in saving the world," Sara comments. "Resource exploitation has adopted the discourse of sustainability, but yet it's just attempting to find better ways to maintain practices of consumption."

Family Conflicts

The artist and her relatives have personally conflicted with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter rules on herding. Previously, Sara's brother undertook a set of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the required reduction of his livestock, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara produced a multi-year collection of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge curtain of 400 reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it resides in the entryway.

The Role of Art in Awareness

For many Sámi, visual expression seems the exclusive domain in which they can be understood by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|