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Visitors to Tate Modern are accustomed to unexpected encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an man-made sun, glided down spiral slides, and seen automated sea creatures drifting through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nose chambers of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this immense space—developed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a winding structure inspired by the expanded inside of a reindeer's nose cavities. Inside, they can wander around or relax on skins, listening on earphones to Sámi elders telling narratives and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It may seem playful, but the artwork pays tribute to a obscure scientific wonder: researchers have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the ambient air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, allowing the animal to survive in harsh Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "generates a feeling of smallness that you as a individual are not superior over nature." The artist is a former journalist, young adult author, and land defender, who hails from a herding family in northern Norway. "Maybe that fosters the potential to change your perspective or trigger some humility," she adds.

An Homage to Indigenous Heritage

The maze-like design is among various elements in Sara's engaging art project celebrating the heritage, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number about 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They have endured discrimination, forced assimilation, and eradication of their tongue by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the work also spotlights the community's challenges connected to the global warming, property rights, and imperialism.

Meaning in Components

On the long entry incline, there's a towering, eighty-five-foot formation of skins entangled by power and light cables. It serves as a metaphor for the political and economic systems restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this part of the installation, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby solid sheets of ice develop as changing weather melt and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' main cold-season sustenance, fungus. This phenomenon is a result of planetary warming, which is taking place up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than globally.

A few years back, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a icy season and joined Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they hauled containers of animal nutrition on to the exposed tundra to provide manually. These animals crowded round us, scratching the icy ground in futility for vegetative morsels. This costly and demanding procedure is having a severe impact on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the alternative is malnutrition. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are perishing—a number from lack of food, others suffocating after sinking in lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the art is a tribute to them. "With the layering of elements, in a way I'm introducing the condition to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

The sculpture also underscores the stark contrast between the western understanding of energy as a commodity to be utilized for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of life force as an innate power in animals, people, and the environment. Tate Modern's legacy as a coal and oil power station is connected to this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be exemplars for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have clashed with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and way of life are threatened. "It's hard being such a small minority to defend yourself when the justifications are grounded in global sustainability," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the discourse of ecology, but still it's just striving to find alternative ways to continue habits of expenditure."

Individual Challenges

The artist and her kin have themselves clashed with the Norwegian government over its tightening policies on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's brother embarked on a sequence of finally failed lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara created a four-year series of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal drape of 400 animal bones, which was exhibited at the the show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the lobby.

The Role of Art in Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work is the only realm in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|