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Guests to Tate Modern are familiar to surprising experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an artificial sun, slid down spiral slides, and observed automated jellyfish hovering through the air. However this marks the first time they will be immersing themselves in the detailed nose cavities of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this cavernous space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a maze-like structure modeled after the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nasal passages. Once inside, they can wander around or unwind on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to Sámi elders imparting tales and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It may appear quirky, but the exhibit honors a obscure biological feat: researchers have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it inhales by 80 degrees celsius, allowing the creature to survive in inhospitable Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "creates a feeling of inferiority that you as a individual are not superior over nature." She is a ex- journalist, writer for kids, and land defender, who is from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Possibly that fosters the potential to change your viewpoint or spark some humbleness," she adds.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The winding structure is one of several features in Sara's immersive art project showcasing the traditions, science, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi count about 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They've experienced persecution, cultural suppression, and repression of their tongue by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the art also spotlights the people's struggles relating to the global warming, property rights, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Elements

At the long entrance ramp, there's a soaring, 26-meter structure of skins entangled by electrical wires. It represents a analogy for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this section of the installation, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, whereby dense coatings of ice appear as changing conditions liquefy and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' main winter nourishment, fungus. The condition is a result of planetary warming, which is taking place up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than in other regions.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they carried carts of supplementary feed on to the barren tundra to provide through labor. These animals gathered round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain for vegetative pieces. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive process is having a severe effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. However the other option is malnutrition. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are succumbing—some from hunger, others drowning after falling into streams through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the art is a memorial to them. "With the layering of elements, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

The sculpture also underscores the sharp difference between the western interpretation of energy as a commodity to be harnessed for gain and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an inherent power in animals, people, and land. The gallery's history as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by Nordic countries. As they strive to be exemplars for clean sources, Nordic nations have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, river barriers, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their legal protections, livelihoods, and way of life are at risk. "It's hard being such a tiny group to stand your ground when the reasons are rooted in saving the world," Sara comments. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the language of sustainability, but nonetheless it's just striving to find better ways to persist in patterns of use."

Individual Struggles

She and her relatives have personally disagreed with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent rules on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's sibling undertook a sequence of finally failed legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara developed a four-year set of creations called Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive curtain of numerous animal bones, which was displayed at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later purchased by the national institution, where it is displayed in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

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