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Guests to Tate Modern are used to surprising encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an simulated sun, glided down spiral slides, and observed robotic sea creatures drifting through the air. But this marks the first time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nasal cavities of a reindeer. The latest artistic project for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a labyrinthine structure based on the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nasal airways. Inside, they can wander around or chill out on pelts, listening on headphones to community leaders telling tales and wisdom.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It may sound quirky, but the exhibit celebrates a rarely recognized biological feat: researchers have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the surrounding air it takes in by 80°C, helping the animal to endure in harsh Arctic conditions. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "generates a sense of insignificance that you as a person are not superior over nature." Sara is a former journalist, young adult author, and environmental activist, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that fosters the chance to shift your viewpoint or spark some modesty," she adds.

A Tribute to Indigenous Heritage

The winding design is one of several components in Sara's engaging exhibition celebrating the heritage, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total about 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They have endured persecution, cultural suppression, and suppression of their dialect by all four nations. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the installation also spotlights the group's struggles relating to the climate crisis, land dispossession, and external control.

Symbolism in Materials

On the long access ramp, there's a soaring, 26-meter formation of reindeer hides trapped by power and light cables. It serves as a metaphor for the societal frameworks restricting the Sámi. Part pylon, part spiritual ascent, this component of the installation, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein thick layers of ice appear as fluctuating temperatures liquefy and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' key winter nourishment, fungus. Goavvi is a outcome of planetary warming, which is happening up to four times faster in the Polar region than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a icy season and went with Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they transported carts of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured tundra to provide by hand. The herd crowded round us, pawing the frozen ground in vain attempts for mossy pieces. This expensive and laborious procedure is having a drastic influence on herding practices—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the other option is malnutrition. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are succumbing—a number from hunger, others suffocating after falling into water bodies through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the art is a memorial to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

The installation also emphasizes the stark contrast between the industrial interpretation of electricity as a resource to be exploited for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of energy as an innate essence in animals, humans, and nature. Tate Modern's past as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be exemplars for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have clashed with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, river barriers, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi assert 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 reasons are grounded in saving the world," Sara notes. "Mining practices has co-opted the discourse of ecology, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find alternative ways to maintain patterns of consumption."

Personal Struggles

She and her kin have personally conflicted with the state authorities over its increasingly stringent policies on herding. A few years ago, Sara's sibling embarked on a sequence of unsuccessful lawsuits over the required reduction of his livestock, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a extended set of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal drape of 400 animal bones, which was displayed at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it resides in the entryway.

Art as Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, art appears the exclusive domain in which they can be understood by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|