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Attendees to Tate Modern are accustomed to unexpected experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an simulated sun, descended down spiral slides, and observed robotic sea creatures hovering through the air. But this marks the inaugural time they will be immersing themselves in the detailed nose chambers of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this cavernous space—created by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a winding structure modeled after the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose cavities. Inside, they can stroll around or unwind on pelts, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors imparting narratives and knowledge.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why choose the nasal structure? It may seem playful, but the artwork celebrates a obscure natural marvel: researchers have discovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the ambient air it inhales by eighty degrees, allowing the animal to survive in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara explains, "produces a perception of inferiority that you as a person are not in control over nature." Sara is a ex- writer, children's author, and rights advocate, who comes from a herding family in northern Norway. "Possibly that fosters the possibility to alter your perspective or trigger some modesty," she continues.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The winding installation is part of a elements in Sara's absorbing exhibition honoring the heritage, knowledge, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total about 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They have faced persecution, cultural suppression, and repression of their tongue by all four nations. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the installation also highlights the people's issues relating to the climate crisis, loss of territory, and external control.

Meaning in Materials

At the extended access ramp, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot formation of skins trapped by utility lines. It serves as a analogy for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this component of the installation, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, wherein solid layers of ice form as varying conditions liquefy and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary winter food, moss. The condition is a consequence of planetary warming, which is occurring up to four times faster in the Far North than elsewhere.

Previously, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they hauled containers of food pellets on to the barren tundra to dispense manually. These animals gathered round us, scratching the frozen ground in vain for vegetative pieces. This costly and labour-intensive process is having a significant influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the other option is starvation. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are succumbing—some from starvation, others suffocating after plunging into lakes and rivers through prematurely melting ice. To some extent, the installation is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm introducing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Perspectives

This artwork also emphasizes the clear contrast between the western view of energy as a resource to be exploited for profit and survival and the Sámi worldview of energy as an inherent life force in creatures, individuals, and land. This venue's legacy as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by regional governments. While attempting to be exemplars for sustainable power, Nordic nations have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their legal protections, ways of life, and traditions are endangered. "It's hard being such a small minority to protect your rights when the justifications are based on environmental protection," Sara notes. "Mining practices has co-opted the language of sustainability, but still it's just striving to find better ways to maintain practices of consumption."

Individual Conflicts

The artist and her relatives have themselves clashed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent rules on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's sibling undertook a sequence of finally failed lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara created a multi-year set of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive drape of four hundred animal bones, which was displayed at the 2017's art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it is displayed in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

For many Sámi, art appears the sole sphere in which they can be understood by outsiders. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|