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Visitors to Tate Modern are used to surprising displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've basked under an man-made sun, glided down spiral slides, and witnessed automated sea creatures floating through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the complex nasal cavities of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this huge space—created by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a winding structure based on the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose cavities. Inside, they can meander around or relax on skins, tuning in on earphones to community leaders telling stories and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It could sound playful, but the installation celebrates a rarely recognized natural marvel: experts have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it inhales by 80 degrees celsius, helping the creature to survive in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "produces a perception of inferiority that you as a person are not superior over nature." She is a former reporter, children's author, and rights advocate, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that fosters the potential to alter your viewpoint or evoke some humility," she states.

A Celebration to Indigenous Heritage

The labyrinthine structure is among various elements in Sara's immersive commission celebrating the traditions, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi total about 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They've experienced discrimination, cultural suppression, and suppression of their tongue by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the installation also spotlights the people's issues associated with the climate crisis, property rights, and external control.

Meaning in Elements

Along the lengthy access slope, there's a looming, 26-metre sculpture of pelts ensnared by utility lines. It serves as a symbol for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this section of the installation, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which thick sheets of ice form as fluctuating conditions liquefy and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' key cold-season nourishment, moss. The condition is a outcome of climate change, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than globally.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they carried trailers of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to distribute manually. These animals gathered round us, scratching the icy ground in vain attempts for mossy morsels. This resource-intensive and laborious procedure is having a significant effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. Yet the other option is malnutrition. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are perishing—a number from hunger, others submerging after plunging into streams through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the work is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Perspectives

The installation also underscores the stark contrast between the western interpretation of energy as a resource to be utilized for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi outlook of life force as an innate power in animals, individuals, and the environment. The gallery's past as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by Nordic countries. As they strive to be exemplars for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, river barriers, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their legal protections, livelihoods, and traditions are endangered. "It's challenging being such a limited population to protect your rights when the arguments are rooted in saving the world," Sara comments. "Mining practices has co-opted the rhetoric of sustainability, but yet it's just striving to find alternative ways to continue practices of consumption."

Personal Conflicts

Sara and her family have personally disagreed with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter rules on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's sibling embarked on a set of unsuccessful legal cases over the required reduction of his animals, apparently to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara created a four-year series of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge screen of 400 reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the lobby.

Art as Advocacy

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