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Attendees to Tate Modern are familiar to surprising experiences in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've basked under an man-made sun, glided down helter skelters, and witnessed AI-powered sea creatures floating through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the detailed nasal cavities of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a maze-like construction inspired by the expanded interior of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Inside, they can wander around or unwind on pelts, listening on headphones to community leaders telling stories and insights.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It might appear quirky, but the installation pays tribute to a obscure biological feat: scientists have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, allowing the creature to survive in extreme Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "generates a feeling of inferiority that you as a individual are not superior over nature." The artist is a former journalist, writer for kids, and land defender, who hails from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that fosters the potential to change your outlook or spark some humbleness," she adds.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The winding installation is among various components in Sara's engaging exhibition celebrating the heritage, science, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They've experienced persecution, integration policies, and eradication of their language by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi mythology and origin tale, the installation also spotlights the people's challenges associated with the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Components

Along the lengthy entry slope, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot structure of skins ensnared by power and light cables. It can be read as a symbol for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this part of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an harsh environmental condition, whereby dense sheets of ice develop as fluctuating conditions thaw and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' key cold-season sustenance, moss. The condition is a result of global heating, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Far North than elsewhere.

Previously, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and joined Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they carried trailers of supplementary feed on to the barren tundra to distribute by hand. The reindeer crowded round us, scratching the icy ground in vain for mossy pieces. This costly and laborious method is having a drastic impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the choice is malnutrition. As these icy periods become routine, reindeer are perishing—some from hunger, others submerging after falling into water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the installation is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of elements, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

This artwork also highlights the stark difference between the modern understanding of electricity as a resource to be harnessed for profit and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an inherent power in creatures, individuals, and nature. Tate Modern's history as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as eco-imperialism by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be leaders for clean sources, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and way of life are at risk. "It's hard being such a tiny group to protect your rights when the justifications are based on saving the world," Sara observes. "Extractivism has co-opted the rhetoric of sustainability, but still it's just attempting to find better ways to continue patterns of use."

Family Struggles

The artist and her relatives have themselves conflicted with the national administration over its increasingly stringent regulations on herding. In 2016, Sara's sibling embarked on a series of finally failed legal cases over the required reduction of his animals, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara produced a multi-year series of creations named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge curtain of numerous animal bones, which was exhibited at the 2017's art exhibition Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the lobby.

Art as Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, visual expression appears the only realm in which they can be heard by outsiders. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|