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Attendees to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an artificial sun, descended down amusement rides, and observed AI-powered sea creatures drifting through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nasal passages of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this immense space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages patrons into a winding construction modeled after the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nose passages. Once inside, they can stroll around or relax on pelts, listening on earphones to community leaders imparting tales and wisdom.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It could sound quirky, but the artwork celebrates a rarely recognized natural marvel: experts have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the creature to survive in extreme Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara explains, "creates a perception of inferiority that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." She is a ex- reporter, children's author, and rights advocate, who is from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Possibly that creates the chance to alter your perspective or spark some modesty," she states.

A Celebration to Indigenous Heritage

The labyrinthine design is part of a elements in Sara's immersive art project honoring the culture, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi number about 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They have endured persecution, integration policies, and eradication of their dialect by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the work also draws attention to the community's issues associated with the environmental emergency, property rights, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Materials

Along the extended entry ramp, there's a soaring, 26-metre sculpture of pelts trapped by utility lines. It can be read as a metaphor for the societal frameworks constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this component of the installation, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which thick coatings of ice appear as fluctuating weather melt and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' key winter food, lichen. Goavvi is a outcome of global heating, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than globally.

Previously, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they transported carts of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to distribute manually. The herd crowded round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain for vegetative bits. This costly and demanding process is having a severe influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. Yet the alternative is malnutrition. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—a number from hunger, others submerging after sinking in lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. In a sense, the art is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of elements, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

This artwork also highlights the clear contrast between the industrial understanding of power as a commodity to be harnessed for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an natural essence in animals, humans, and land. The gallery's past as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be leaders for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have clashed with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, river barriers, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their human rights, livelihoods, and culture are endangered. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the arguments are based on global sustainability," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has adopted the language of environmentalism, but yet it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to continue practices of consumption."

Family Struggles

The artist and her family have themselves conflicted with the national administration over its increasingly stringent regulations on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's sibling initiated a set of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a multi-year series of creations named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a colossal curtain of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the 2017's art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it is displayed in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, art seems the only realm in which they can be heard by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|