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Visitors to Tate Modern are used to surprising experiences in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an man-made sun, slid down amusement rides, and seen automated jellyfish hovering through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nasal chambers of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this immense space—developed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a winding design modeled after the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose cavities. Once inside, they can meander around or unwind on pelts, listening on headphones to Sámi elders telling tales and wisdom.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It might appear playful, but the installation celebrates a rarely recognized biological feat: experts have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it breathes in by 80°C, helping the animal to endure in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "creates a perception of smallness that you as a human being are not superior over nature." Sara is a former reporter, young adult author, and land defender, who hails from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Maybe that fosters the possibility to change your viewpoint or trigger some humbleness," she continues.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The maze-like design is one of several features in Sara's absorbing commission celebrating the traditions, understanding, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They've faced discrimination, integration policies, and repression of their language by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the art also highlights the people's challenges associated with the global warming, property rights, and external control.

Metaphor in Materials

Along the lengthy access slope, there's a towering, 26-metre structure of pelts entangled by electrical wires. It can be read as a metaphor for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this component of the installation, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby dense layers of ice develop as fluctuating temperatures melt and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary winter food, moss. This phenomenon is a consequence of climate change, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they hauled trailers of animal nutrition on to the exposed Arctic plains to provide by hand. These animals crowded round us, digging the frozen ground in vain for vegetative morsels. This costly and laborious process is having a drastic influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. However the alternative is malnutrition. As these icy periods become routine, reindeer are succumbing—some from lack of food, others drowning after plunging into water bodies through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the art is a monument to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Perspectives

This artwork also emphasizes the sharp divergence between the industrial view of electricity as a commodity to be utilized for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of life force as an inherent life force in animals, people, and the environment. This venue's legacy as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by Nordic countries. While attempting to be exemplars for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi assert their human rights, incomes, and traditions are at risk. "It's hard being such a limited population to defend yourself when the arguments are rooted in global sustainability," Sara notes. "Extractivism has co-opted the rhetoric of ecology, but still it's just attempting to find better ways to maintain patterns of consumption."

Individual Challenges

Sara and her family have personally disagreed with the state authorities over its increasingly stringent rules on herding. Previously, Sara's brother initiated a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the forced culling of his herd, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara created a extended set of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge drape of numerous cranial remains, which was exhibited at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For many Sámi, creative work appears the exclusive sphere in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|