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Attendees to Tate Modern are used to unusual displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have basked under an artificial sun, descended down helter skelters, and witnessed robotic jellyfish hovering through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nasal passages of a reindeer. The latest artistic project for this immense space—created by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes patrons into a maze-like design modeled after the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose cavities. Inside, they can meander around or unwind on skins, tuning in on headphones to Sámi elders imparting narratives and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It may sound quirky, but the installation honors a obscure biological feat: experts have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the ambient air it takes in by 80°C, enabling the creature to endure in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "produces a sense of insignificance that you as a person are not dominant over nature." The artist is a former journalist, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who is from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that fosters the potential to shift your perspective or evoke some humbleness," she states.

A Celebration to Indigenous Heritage

The winding structure is among various elements in Sara's absorbing art project celebrating the heritage, understanding, and philosophy of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total about 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They have faced persecution, forced assimilation, and suppression of their dialect by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi belief system and founding narrative, the art also highlights the people's issues relating to the climate crisis, land dispossession, and external control.

Meaning in Components

At the extended access slope, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot formation of pelts ensnared by electrical wires. It can be read as a metaphor for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this section of the exhibit, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which dense sheets of ice form as varying weather melt and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' main winter nourishment, fungus. The condition is a result of climate change, which is happening up to four times faster in the Far North than in other regions.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they carried containers of animal nutrition on to the barren frozen landscape to provide by hand. The reindeer crowded round us, pawing the frozen ground in vain for vegetative bits. This expensive and laborious method is having a significant effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. But the choice is death. As these icy periods become frequent, reindeer are dying—some from starvation, others submerging after sinking in water bodies through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the work is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Perspectives

The installation also emphasizes the clear contrast between the modern view of electricity as a commodity to be utilized for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi worldview of life force as an inherent life force in creatures, people, and land. Tate Modern's history as a coal and oil power station is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by Nordic countries. While attempting to be leaders for sustainable power, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi assert their human rights, livelihoods, and way of life are endangered. "It's hard being such a tiny group to stand your ground when the arguments are grounded in environmental protection," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the language of environmentalism, but still it's just aiming to find alternative ways to maintain habits of consumption."

Personal Struggles

The artist and her kin have themselves disagreed with the state authorities over its increasingly stringent regulations on herding. In 2016, Sara's sibling undertook a set of unsuccessful legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara produced a extended set of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi including a huge curtain of 400 animal bones, which was shown at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

For many Sámi, creative work is the exclusive domain in which they can be understood by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|