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Attendees to Tate Modern are used to surprising displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an artificial sun, slid down spiral slides, and seen AI-powered sea creatures drifting through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the detailed nasal cavities of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this huge space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a maze-like structure inspired by the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nose cavities. Inside, they can meander around or chill out on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to Sámi elders sharing tales and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It could sound quirky, but the installation pays tribute to a little-known scientific wonder: scientists have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it breathes in by 80°C, allowing the animal to endure in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "produces a sense of inferiority that you as a individual are not in control over nature." She is a former writer, young adult author, and environmental activist, who is from a reindeer-herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Possibly that generates the chance to change your outlook or evoke some modesty," she states.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The maze-like structure is one of several features in Sara's engaging commission honoring the heritage, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They've faced persecution, integration policies, and repression of their language by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the art also highlights the people's struggles connected to the environmental emergency, property rights, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Materials

On the lengthy access incline, there's a looming, 26-meter sculpture of pelts entangled by electrical wires. It serves as a symbol for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this part of the installation, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, wherein dense layers of ice develop as fluctuating weather melt and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' key cold-season nourishment, fungus. This phenomenon is a outcome of planetary warming, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than elsewhere.

Previously, I visited Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and joined Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in freezing temperatures as they hauled containers of supplementary feed on to the barren tundra to provide through labor. The reindeer surrounded round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain for mossy bits. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive method is having a severe impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. However the choice is malnutrition. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—a number from starvation, others drowning after sinking in streams through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the work is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

The sculpture also highlights the clear difference between the modern view of electricity as a asset to be exploited for profit and existence and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an innate life force in creatures, individuals, and the environment. Tate Modern's history as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be leaders for sustainable power, Nordic nations have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of windfarms, river barriers, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and culture are threatened. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the justifications are grounded in saving the world," Sara notes. "Extractivism has appropriated the rhetoric of ecology, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find better ways to continue patterns of consumption."

Personal Challenges

The artist and her relatives have themselves conflicted with the national administration over its increasingly stringent rules on animal husbandry. Previously, Sara's sibling undertook a set of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the required reduction of his livestock, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara developed a four-year series of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi including a huge screen of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the entryway.

The Role of Art in Activism

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