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Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an man-made sun, descended down spiral slides, and witnessed AI-powered jellyfish floating through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be immersing themselves in the detailed nasal passages of a reindeer. The latest artistic project for this cavernous space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes patrons into a maze-like construction based on the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Once inside, they can wander around or unwind on skins, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors sharing stories and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It may sound playful, but the installation pays tribute to a obscure natural marvel: experts have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the ambient air it breathes in by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the animal to endure in extreme Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "generates a sense of smallness that you as a person are not in control over nature." Sara is a ex- writer, children's author, and land defender, who comes from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Maybe that generates the potential to shift your viewpoint or trigger some modesty," she states.

A Celebration to Indigenous Heritage

The labyrinthine structure is among various elements in Sara's immersive exhibition celebrating the heritage, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total about 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They have experienced discrimination, cultural suppression, and suppression of their dialect by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the art also spotlights the community's issues associated with the global warming, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Elements

On the extended entrance incline, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot structure of skins entangled by power and light cables. It serves as a metaphor for the political and economic systems restricting the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this part of the exhibit, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi word for an severe climatic event, whereby solid sheets of ice form as fluctuating conditions liquefy and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' key winter sustenance, lichen. The condition is a consequence of climate change, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Polar region than elsewhere.

A few years back, I met with Sara in a remote town during a icy season and joined Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they carried containers of food pellets on to the exposed tundra to dispense through labor. The herd gathered round us, scratching the icy ground in futility for vegetative pieces. This expensive and labour-intensive procedure is having a drastic effect on herding practices—and on the animals' natural survival. But the alternative is starvation. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are succumbing—some from lack of food, others suffocating after falling into streams through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the installation is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of elements, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

This artwork also emphasizes the stark difference between the western view of power as a resource to be utilized for profit and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an inherent power in animals, humans, and nature. This venue's past as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as eco-imperialism by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be leaders for sustainable power, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the development of wind energy projects, river barriers, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their human rights, incomes, and traditions are threatened. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to defend yourself when the reasons are grounded in environmental protection," Sara observes. "Extractivism has adopted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find alternative ways to persist in patterns of use."

Family Conflicts

Sara and her family have themselves clashed with the state authorities over its ever-stricter policies on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's sibling embarked on a sequence of unsuccessful legal cases over the required reduction of his animals, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara developed a extended set of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge screen of numerous reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the entrance.

Art as Activism

For many Sámi, creative work is the sole sphere in which they can be understood by outsiders. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|