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Guests to Tate Modern are accustomed to unexpected experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an simulated sun, descended down spiral slides, and observed robotic sea creatures floating through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nose passages of a reindeer. The latest artistic project for this cavernous space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a maze-like construction modeled after the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Inside, they can meander around or chill out on skins, listening on earphones to Sámi elders imparting stories and knowledge.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It could seem playful, but the exhibit pays tribute to a obscure natural marvel: scientists have discovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it breathes in by 80°C, helping the creature to endure in inhospitable Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "generates a perception of smallness that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." The artist is a former reporter, young adult author, and rights advocate, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that creates the possibility to alter your outlook or spark some modesty," she continues.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The winding structure is one of several features in Sara's immersive art project honoring the traditions, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They have faced discrimination, cultural suppression, and eradication of their language by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi belief system and founding narrative, the installation also highlights the group's struggles connected to the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Meaning in Elements

At the long entrance ramp, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot structure of skins entangled by utility lines. It can be read as a symbol for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this component of the exhibit, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an severe climatic event, wherein dense layers of ice develop as fluctuating weather melt and ice over the snow, locking in the reindeers' main winter sustenance, lichen. The condition is a consequence of global heating, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than globally.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a icy season and went with Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in freezing temperatures as they carried containers of food pellets on to the barren frozen landscape to distribute through labor. These animals surrounded round us, pawing the frozen ground in vain attempts for vegetative bits. This expensive and demanding process is having a significant effect on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. Yet the alternative is death. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—some from lack of food, others submerging after falling into water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. In a sense, the work is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of elements, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Perspectives

The sculpture also underscores the stark contrast between the modern view of electricity as a resource to be exploited for gain and existence and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an natural essence in animals, humans, and land. Tate Modern's legacy as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by Nordic countries. As they strive to be exemplars for sustainable power, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the development of windfarms, water power facilities, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi contend their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and traditions are endangered. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to protect your rights when the reasons are grounded in saving the world," Sara notes. "Mining practices has adopted the rhetoric of sustainability, but still it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to persist in practices of consumption."

Family Conflicts

She and her family have themselves clashed with the national administration over its tightening rules on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's sibling initiated a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful court actions over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara created a extended collection of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive drape of numerous animal bones, which was shown at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the public gallery, where it hangs in the entryway.

The Role of Art in Advocacy

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