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Visitors to Tate Modern are accustomed to surprising encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an man-made sun, descended down helter skelters, and seen automated jellyfish drifting through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nose chambers of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this huge space—created by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes patrons into a maze-like construction based on the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose cavities. Inside, they can wander around or chill out on reindeer hides, tuning in on earphones to community leaders imparting stories and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It might seem quirky, but the exhibit pays tribute to a obscure scientific wonder: researchers have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it inhales by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the animal to thrive in extreme Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "produces a feeling of insignificance that you as a individual are not in control over nature." The artist is a former journalist, children's author, and rights advocate, who is from a herding family in northern Norway. "Possibly that fosters the chance to change your viewpoint or trigger some humbleness," she states.

A Celebration to Indigenous Heritage

The labyrinthine design is part of a features in Sara's engaging commission honoring the culture, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number roughly 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They have faced discrimination, forced assimilation, and suppression of their language by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the art also spotlights the community's challenges associated with the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Meaning in Materials

Along the extended entrance slope, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot sculpture of skins entangled by power and light cables. It serves as a symbol for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Part pylon, part spiritual ascent, this part of the exhibit, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein solid coatings of ice form as changing weather thaw and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary winter sustenance, moss. Goavvi is a result of climate change, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Far North than globally.

Previously, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and went with Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they hauled trailers of supplementary feed on to the exposed tundra to dispense by hand. These animals gathered round us, pawing the frozen ground in vain attempts for vegetative morsels. This expensive and demanding method is having a severe influence on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. Yet the alternative is death. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are perishing—some from starvation, others submerging after sinking in streams through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the work is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm introducing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

This artwork also emphasizes the sharp difference between the western view of electricity as a resource to be exploited for profit and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an innate essence in animals, people, and nature. The gallery's legacy as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi consider environmental exploitation by regional governments. While attempting to be standard bearers for sustainable power, these states have locked horns with the Sámi over the development of wind energy projects, river barriers, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, livelihoods, and traditions are threatened. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to stand your ground when the reasons are rooted in saving the world," Sara notes. "Mining practices has co-opted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but still it's just striving to find alternative ways to persist in habits of expenditure."

Family Conflicts

The artist and her family have personally disagreed with the Norwegian government over its tightening policies on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's sibling embarked on a series of unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, supposedly to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara developed a extended series of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi including a huge curtain of numerous animal bones, which was exhibited at the the event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the entryway.

Art as Awareness

For many Sámi, creative work seems the only realm in which they can be understood by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|