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Guests to Tate Modern are used to unusual displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've basked under an artificial sun, slid down amusement rides, and witnessed automated sea creatures floating through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nose chambers of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this cavernous space—created by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a labyrinthine design inspired by the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Upon entering, they can stroll around or relax on pelts, tuning in on headphones to Sámi elders sharing narratives and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It might seem quirky, but the installation celebrates a obscure biological feat: scientists have discovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it breathes in by eighty degrees, allowing the animal to endure in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "produces a sense of insignificance that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." She is a former writer, children's author, and rights advocate, who is from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that creates the chance to alter your outlook or evoke some humbleness," she adds.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The winding structure is part of a elements in Sara's absorbing exhibition celebrating the traditions, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They have endured discrimination, integration policies, and suppression of their language by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi belief system and founding narrative, the installation also draws attention to the people's challenges connected to the climate crisis, property rights, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Materials

Along the long access slope, there's a soaring, 26-metre sculpture of pelts trapped by power and light cables. It represents a symbol for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this component of the exhibit, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which dense sheets of ice appear as varying conditions thaw and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' key cold-season nourishment, moss. Goavvi is a outcome of climate change, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than in other regions.

Three years ago, I met with Sara in a remote town during a icy season and went with Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they hauled trailers of supplementary feed on to the exposed frozen landscape to dispense manually. These animals crowded round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain for mossy bits. This expensive and demanding method is having a drastic impact on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. Yet the alternative is death. As these icy periods become frequent, reindeer are dying—some from lack of food, others drowning after falling into streams through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the installation is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm introducing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Perspectives

The sculpture also highlights the clear difference between the modern understanding of energy as a commodity to be harnessed for profit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an inherent power in creatures, individuals, and the environment. The gallery's past as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by Nordic countries. As they strive to be leaders for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have clashed with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, river barriers, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their legal protections, livelihoods, and culture are at risk. "It's hard being such a limited population to protect your rights when the justifications are rooted in environmental protection," Sara observes. "Mining practices has co-opted the rhetoric of ecology, but nonetheless it's just striving to find better ways to maintain patterns of use."

Personal Challenges

The artist and her family have personally conflicted with the state authorities over its tightening regulations on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's sibling embarked on a set of finally failed court actions over the forced culling of his animals, apparently to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara developed a extended collection of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi including a huge curtain of four hundred cranial remains, which was displayed at the 2017 event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the public gallery, where it resides in the lobby.

Art as Awareness

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