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Visitors to Tate Modern are accustomed to surprising displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an man-made sun, glided down helter skelters, and observed automated sea creatures drifting through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be venturing themselves in the complex nasal cavities of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a labyrinthine construction modeled after the expanded interior of a reindeer's nasal airways. Once inside, they can wander around or unwind on skins, tuning in on headphones to Sámi elders sharing narratives and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It could appear playful, but the exhibit pays tribute to a rarely recognized biological feat: experts have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the ambient air it inhales by eighty degrees, helping the animal to endure in extreme Arctic climates. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "creates a sense of smallness that you as a person are not superior over nature." She is a ex- reporter, young adult author, and environmental activist, who is from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that creates the potential to change your perspective or evoke some modesty," she adds.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The winding installation is part of a components in Sara's engaging commission celebrating the traditions, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They've endured persecution, cultural suppression, and repression of their dialect by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the installation also highlights the group's issues relating to the global warming, property rights, and external control.

Symbolism in Materials

On the extended entry slope, there's a soaring, 26-meter formation of pelts ensnared by utility lines. It can be read as a symbol for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this part of the exhibit, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein thick layers of ice appear as varying temperatures thaw and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' key cold-season nourishment, lichen. Goavvi is a consequence of climate change, which is taking place up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than elsewhere.

A few years back, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they carried containers of animal nutrition on to the barren frozen landscape to distribute through labor. These animals crowded round us, digging the icy ground in vain attempts for vegetative pieces. This expensive and laborious process is having a drastic impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the alternative is death. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are perishing—some from starvation, others submerging after plunging into water bodies through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the art is a monument to them. "With the layering of elements, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

This artwork also underscores the sharp divergence between the western view of energy as a resource to be exploited for profit and survival and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an natural essence in creatures, people, and nature. Tate Modern's history as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by Nordic countries. In their efforts to be leaders for renewable energy, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the development of windfarms, water power facilities, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and way of life are at risk. "It's challenging being such a limited population to stand your ground when the justifications are rooted in global sustainability," Sara observes. "Extractivism has co-opted the discourse of sustainability, but nonetheless it's just striving to find alternative ways to persist in patterns of consumption."

Family Struggles

Sara and her kin have themselves clashed with the state authorities over its ever-stricter rules on animal husbandry. Previously, Sara's brother initiated a set of finally failed lawsuits over the forced culling of his animals, apparently to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara developed a four-year series of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal screen of 400 cranial remains, which was exhibited at the the event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it hangs in the lobby.

Creative Expression as Activism

For many Sámi, visual expression seems the only realm in which they can be understood by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|