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Visitors to Tate Modern are used to unexpected displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an artificial sun, descended down spiral slides, and seen automated sea creatures hovering through the air. Yet this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nose passages of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this cavernous space—developed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a winding structure modeled after the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose passages. Upon entering, they can wander around or relax on reindeer hides, tuning in on headphones to community leaders sharing narratives and wisdom.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It could appear quirky, but the exhibit honors a rarely recognized scientific wonder: experts have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it inhales by eighty degrees, allowing the creature to thrive in extreme Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "produces a sense of insignificance that you as a person are not in control over nature." She is a ex- reporter, young adult author, and land defender, who comes from a pastoral family in northern Norway. "Maybe that fosters the potential to shift your outlook or trigger some modesty," she states.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The maze-like installation is one of several elements in Sara's immersive commission showcasing the traditions, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They have endured oppression, cultural suppression, and eradication of their dialect by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi mythology and origin tale, the installation also draws attention to the group's struggles relating to the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and external control.

Metaphor in Materials

On the long access incline, there's a towering, 26-metre sculpture of skins entangled by utility lines. It represents a metaphor for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this part of the artwork, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an harsh environmental condition, in which dense sheets of ice form as fluctuating weather liquefy and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' main cold-season nourishment, moss. Goavvi is a result of global heating, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a icy season and joined Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they hauled trailers of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to provide through labor. The herd crowded round us, digging the frozen ground in futility for lichen-covered bits. This expensive and demanding method is having a significant impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. However the choice is death. As these icy periods become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—a number from lack of food, others submerging after falling into streams through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the work is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of elements, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

This artwork also underscores the stark divergence between the industrial view of electricity as a resource to be exploited for gain and survival and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an innate essence in animals, humans, and the environment. The gallery's past as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by regional governments. In their efforts to be exemplars for clean sources, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, river barriers, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi assert their human rights, livelihoods, and way of life are threatened. "It's challenging being such a small minority to defend yourself when the reasons are based on saving the world," Sara observes. "Mining practices has co-opted the rhetoric of ecology, but yet it's just striving to find better ways to persist in patterns of expenditure."

Individual Challenges

Sara and her relatives have personally conflicted with the Norwegian government over its tightening regulations on herding. A few years ago, Sara's sibling initiated a series of finally failed lawsuits over the forced culling of his animals, apparently to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara produced a extended set of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive drape of four hundred cranial remains, which was shown at the the event Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Activism

Among the community, visual expression appears the exclusive domain in which they can be understood by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|