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Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to surprising displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an simulated sun, slid down spiral slides, and observed AI-powered sea creatures floating through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nose cavities of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this huge space—created by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a maze-like design based on the expanded inside of a reindeer's nasal passages. Inside, they can wander around or relax on pelts, listening on headphones to community leaders imparting stories and insights.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It could sound playful, but the installation pays tribute to a little-known natural marvel: researchers have discovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it inhales by eighty degrees, helping the creature to thrive in extreme Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "creates a sense of inferiority that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." The artist is a former reporter, young adult author, and rights advocate, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that creates the chance to alter your outlook or spark some humility," she states.

A Tribute to Traditional Ways

The maze-like design is among various components in Sara's absorbing art project showcasing the traditions, understanding, and philosophy of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They have endured discrimination, integration policies, and suppression of their tongue by all four nations. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the installation also highlights the group's struggles associated with the global warming, land dispossession, and external control.

Metaphor in Elements

Along the extended access incline, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot sculpture of skins trapped by power and light cables. It can be read as a metaphor for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this section of the installation, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, wherein thick sheets of ice form as fluctuating temperatures liquefy and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' key winter sustenance, lichen. Goavvi is a result of global heating, which is taking place up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than in other regions.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a icy season and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they carried containers of animal nutrition on to the barren frozen landscape to distribute by hand. The reindeer crowded round us, scratching the slippery ground in vain attempts for vegetative pieces. This resource-intensive and laborious process is having a severe impact on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. However the alternative is death. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are succumbing—a number from lack of food, others drowning after falling into lakes and rivers through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the work is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

The installation also emphasizes the sharp divergence between the modern understanding of electricity as a commodity to be exploited for gain and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of life force as an innate essence in animals, individuals, and land. This venue's past as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi consider eco-imperialism by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be standard bearers for sustainable power, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of windfarms, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, livelihoods, and way of life are threatened. "It's challenging being such a limited population to stand your ground when the justifications are grounded in global sustainability," Sara notes. "Mining practices has appropriated the discourse of environmentalism, but yet it's just striving to find more suitable ways to maintain patterns of expenditure."

Personal Struggles

Sara and her family have personally clashed with the national administration over its ever-stricter rules on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's brother undertook a series of finally failed lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, apparently to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara produced a four-year collection of creations named Pile O'Sápmi including a huge drape of 400 reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the 2017's art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it hangs in the lobby.

The Role of Art in Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, visual expression appears the only sphere in which they can be understood by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|