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Attendees to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an man-made sun, slid down helter skelters, and seen robotic sea creatures drifting through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be immersing themselves in the complex nasal cavities of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this huge space—created by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a winding construction inspired by the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Upon entering, they can meander around or relax on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to community leaders sharing stories and wisdom.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It might seem quirky, but the exhibit honors a little-known scientific wonder: experts have found that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the ambient air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, helping the creature to endure in harsh Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "generates a feeling of inferiority that you as a person are not in control over nature." Sara is a ex- writer, children's author, and land defender, who is from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that creates the potential to change your perspective or spark some modesty," she states.

A Celebration to Indigenous Heritage

The labyrinthine installation is part of a components in Sara's engaging art project showcasing the culture, understanding, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They have experienced persecution, integration policies, and repression of their dialect by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi mythology and origin tale, the art also highlights the people's issues associated with the global warming, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Meaning in Components

Along the extended access incline, there's a looming, 26-metre formation of reindeer hides entangled by power and light cables. It represents a symbol for the political and economic systems restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this component of the exhibit, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, whereby thick coatings of ice appear as changing weather melt and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' primary cold-season sustenance, fungus. This phenomenon is a outcome of planetary warming, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi herders on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they hauled carts of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to distribute manually. The reindeer surrounded round us, scratching the slippery ground in vain for mossy morsels. This costly and labour-intensive method is having a severe impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. However the alternative is malnutrition. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—some from lack of food, others suffocating after sinking in lakes and rivers through prematurely melting ice. To some extent, the installation is a memorial to them. "With the layering of materials, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

The sculpture also emphasizes the sharp difference between the industrial understanding of power as a commodity to be exploited for gain and survival and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an inherent power in animals, individuals, and nature. This venue's legacy as a fossil fuel plant is connected to this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by Nordic countries. While attempting to be standard bearers for clean sources, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, water power facilities, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and culture are threatened. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to protect your rights when the arguments are based on environmental protection," Sara comments. "Mining practices has appropriated the language of ecology, but still it's just striving to find alternative ways to persist in practices of consumption."

Individual Challenges

The artist and her relatives have personally disagreed with the state authorities over its increasingly stringent regulations on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's sibling initiated a series of finally failed legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a multi-year collection of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi including a massive curtain of numerous cranial remains, which was displayed at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it is displayed in the entryway.

Art as Advocacy

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