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Attendees to Tate Modern are familiar to surprising experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an simulated sun, slid down helter skelters, and witnessed AI-powered sea creatures hovering through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nose passages of a reindeer. The newest artistic project for this cavernous space—developed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a winding construction inspired by the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nasal passages. Inside, they can stroll around or chill out on skins, tuning in on headphones to community leaders telling stories and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It could seem playful, but the exhibit celebrates a rarely recognized biological feat: researchers have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it inhales by eighty degrees, allowing the creature to survive in harsh Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "generates a feeling of inferiority that you as a human being are not superior over nature." Sara is a former journalist, children's author, and land defender, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Maybe that fosters the chance to shift your perspective or evoke some humility," she continues.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The maze-like design is one of several components in Sara's immersive art project honoring the heritage, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total about 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They have endured oppression, cultural suppression, and repression of their dialect by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the work also highlights the community's issues associated with the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Components

At the long entrance ramp, there's a soaring, 26-meter formation of pelts ensnared by utility lines. It serves as a analogy for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this section of the artwork, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, wherein thick layers of ice develop as varying temperatures liquefy and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary cold-season food, lichen. Goavvi is a consequence of global heating, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than globally.

A few years back, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and went with Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they hauled containers of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to dispense by hand. The herd gathered round us, scratching the slippery ground in vain attempts for vegetative bits. This expensive and demanding process is having a drastic impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. Yet the other option is malnutrition. As these icy periods become routine, reindeer are dying—a number from hunger, others suffocating after falling into water bodies through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the art is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

The installation also emphasizes the sharp divergence between the industrial view of electricity as a asset to be exploited for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an natural power in creatures, humans, and the environment. The gallery's history as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by Nordic countries. As they strive to be leaders for sustainable power, these states have locked horns with the Sámi over the development of wind energy projects, river barriers, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their legal protections, incomes, and traditions are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to protect your rights when the arguments are rooted in environmental protection," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the language of environmentalism, but still it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to continue patterns of consumption."

Individual Conflicts

Sara and her relatives have personally disagreed with the Norwegian government over its tightening regulations on herding. In 2016, Sara's sibling initiated a set of unsuccessful legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara produced a extended set of creations named Pile O'Sápmi including a huge drape of numerous reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the 2017's art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it hangs in the entryway.

The Role of Art in Advocacy

For many Sámi, creative work is the exclusive sphere in which they can be heard by outsiders. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|