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Guests to Tate Modern are familiar to unexpected encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an simulated sun, glided down helter skelters, and observed robotic jellyfish drifting through the air. But this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the complex nasal chambers of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this immense space—created by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a maze-like structure inspired by the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nasal passages. Upon entering, they can wander around or unwind on pelts, tuning in on headphones to community leaders imparting tales and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It could sound playful, but the exhibit honors a obscure biological feat: researchers have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it takes in by 80°C, helping the creature to survive in harsh Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "produces a perception of insignificance that you as a person are not in control over nature." She is a ex- journalist, young adult author, and land defender, who is from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that fosters the possibility to shift your viewpoint or evoke some humbleness," she states.

An Homage to Indigenous Heritage

The labyrinthine structure is one of several features in Sara's engaging commission showcasing the culture, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count about 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They've faced discrimination, integration policies, and suppression of their dialect by all four states. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the work also spotlights the people's struggles associated with the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and colonialism.

Meaning in Elements

Along the lengthy entry slope, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot structure of skins entangled by power and light cables. It represents a analogy for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this part of the artwork, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which dense coatings of ice form as changing temperatures thaw and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' key winter sustenance, lichen. This phenomenon is a result of planetary warming, which is happening up to four times faster in the Polar region than in other regions.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they hauled carts of food pellets on to the barren frozen landscape to provide by hand. The herd gathered round us, scratching the icy ground in futility for vegetative pieces. This costly and laborious process is having a drastic impact on herding practices—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the choice is malnutrition. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—some from lack of food, others suffocating after plunging into lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the work is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

This artwork also highlights the clear divergence between the industrial interpretation of energy as a asset to be exploited for profit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of life force as an natural life force in creatures, individuals, and the environment. The gallery's history as a fossil fuel plant is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by Nordic countries. In their efforts to be standard bearers for sustainable power, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of windfarms, hydroelectric dams, and mines on their traditional territory; the Sámi argue their human rights, incomes, and way of life are threatened. "It's hard being such a small minority to stand your ground when the arguments are rooted in environmental protection," Sara observes. "Extractivism has co-opted the discourse of sustainability, but nonetheless it's just attempting to find better ways to maintain habits of expenditure."

Family Challenges

Sara and her kin have personally conflicted with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter rules on herding. Previously, Sara's brother undertook a series of finally failed legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara developed a extended series of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal screen of 400 animal bones, which was shown at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it resides in the entryway.

Art as Activism

For many Sámi, creative work appears the exclusive domain in which they can be understood by outsiders. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|