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Attendees to Tate Modern are used to unexpected displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an simulated sun, descended down helter skelters, and witnessed automated jellyfish floating through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nose chambers of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this huge space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages patrons into a maze-like design modeled after the expanded inside of a reindeer's nose cavities. Once inside, they can wander around or chill out on skins, tuning in on headphones to Sámi elders imparting narratives and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It may seem whimsical, but the installation celebrates a rarely recognized natural marvel: scientists have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it inhales by 80°C, allowing the creature to survive in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "creates a sense of smallness that you as a human being are not in control over nature." She is a former writer, children's author, and land defender, who hails from a herding family in northern Norway. "Possibly that creates the potential to change your viewpoint or trigger some humility," she continues.

A Tribute to Indigenous Heritage

The labyrinthine installation is among various features in Sara's absorbing commission honoring the culture, science, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They've experienced discrimination, integration policies, and eradication of their language by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the installation also spotlights the group's challenges associated with the climate crisis, loss of territory, and colonialism.

Meaning in Components

Along the long access slope, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot structure of reindeer hides entangled by electrical wires. It serves as a metaphor for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this part of the artwork, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, in which dense coatings of ice appear as fluctuating weather thaw and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' key cold-season sustenance, moss. This phenomenon is a consequence of planetary warming, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Far North than elsewhere.

A few years back, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and went with Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in freezing temperatures as they transported containers of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to dispense through labor. The herd gathered round us, pawing the icy ground in vain for mossy pieces. This expensive and demanding process is having a drastic impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. Yet the other option is death. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are perishing—a number from lack of food, others drowning after sinking in streams through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the work is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of elements, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

The sculpture also emphasizes the stark difference between the western view of power as a resource to be exploited for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an natural power in creatures, people, and the environment. The gallery's past as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as eco-imperialism by regional governments. While attempting to be standard bearers for clean sources, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, river barriers, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and way of life are threatened. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to protect your rights when the reasons are grounded in global sustainability," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has adopted the language of sustainability, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to maintain patterns of consumption."

Family Struggles

She and her family have themselves disagreed with the national administration over its tightening policies on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's brother undertook a set of finally failed court actions over the forced culling of his herd, supposedly to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a four-year series of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi including a huge screen of 400 animal bones, which was displayed at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Activism

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