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Visitors to Tate Modern are accustomed to surprising displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an artificial sun, slid down amusement rides, and witnessed automated sea creatures drifting through the air. Yet this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nose cavities of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this huge space—designed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a labyrinthine structure inspired by the expanded inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Upon entering, they can stroll around or relax on skins, listening on earphones to community leaders telling tales and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It may seem whimsical, but the installation honors a rarely recognized biological feat: researchers have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it inhales by eighty degrees, helping the creature to thrive in extreme Arctic conditions. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "generates a sense of insignificance that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." Sara is a ex- journalist, writer for kids, and environmental activist, who is from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Maybe that creates the possibility to shift your perspective or spark some humility," she continues.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The labyrinthine structure is part of a features in Sara's engaging exhibition celebrating the traditions, understanding, and philosophy of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number about 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They have faced oppression, cultural suppression, and suppression of their tongue by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the work also spotlights the people's challenges associated with the global warming, loss of territory, and colonialism.

Meaning in Elements

At the extended access ramp, there's a soaring, 26-meter structure of reindeer hides trapped by power and light cables. It serves as a analogy for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this component of the installation, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby thick sheets of ice appear as varying weather liquefy and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary winter nourishment, lichen. The condition is a outcome of climate change, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Far North than globally.

Previously, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they hauled containers of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to provide by hand. The reindeer crowded round us, scratching the icy ground in vain attempts for vegetative morsels. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive procedure is having a drastic effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. However the alternative is malnutrition. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are dying—a number from hunger, others submerging after sinking in water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. In a sense, the work is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm introducing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

This artwork also highlights the clear divergence between the industrial interpretation of energy as a asset to be utilized for profit and survival and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an natural essence in creatures, people, and the environment. Tate Modern's past as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be standard bearers for sustainable power, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, hydroelectric dams, and mines on their traditional territory; the Sámi contend their legal protections, livelihoods, and way of life are threatened. "It's hard being such a limited population to protect your rights when the arguments are grounded in environmental protection," Sara observes. "Extractivism has co-opted the rhetoric of ecology, but still it's just aiming to find alternative ways to maintain practices of expenditure."

Individual Conflicts

Sara and her family have themselves disagreed with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter regulations on animal husbandry. Previously, Sara's brother initiated a set of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the forced culling of his animals, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara produced a multi-year series of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi including a massive drape of four hundred cranial remains, which was displayed at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it is displayed in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

Among the community, visual expression is the only sphere in which they can be listened to by the global community. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|