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Guests to Tate Modern are used to surprising displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have basked under an artificial sun, descended down helter skelters, and seen automated jellyfish drifting through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nose passages of a reindeer. The newest artistic project for this cavernous space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a winding construction modeled after the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Inside, they can wander around or unwind on reindeer hides, tuning in on headphones to community leaders telling stories and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It may seem quirky, but the artwork pays tribute to a little-known biological feat: researchers have discovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it takes in by eighty degrees, helping the animal to endure in harsh Arctic climates. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "creates a perception of insignificance that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." Sara is a former reporter, children's author, and environmental activist, who is from a pastoral family in northern Norway. "Possibly that fosters the possibility to shift your viewpoint or trigger some humbleness," she adds.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The labyrinthine installation is part of a elements in Sara's immersive art project honoring the culture, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Partially migratory, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They have experienced persecution, integration policies, and suppression of their tongue by all four states. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi belief system and founding narrative, the installation also spotlights the people's challenges connected to the environmental emergency, property rights, and external control.

Symbolism in Elements

Along the long entry slope, there's a looming, 26-metre structure of skins entangled by utility lines. It can be read as a metaphor for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part heavenly staircase, this section of the artwork, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which solid layers of ice appear as fluctuating temperatures liquefy and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' main cold-season sustenance, moss. The condition is a result of planetary warming, which is occurring up to four times faster in the Far North than elsewhere.

Previously, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in freezing temperatures as they transported containers of animal nutrition on to the barren Arctic plains to dispense by hand. The reindeer surrounded round us, scratching the icy ground in vain for mossy morsels. This resource-intensive and demanding procedure is having a significant effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the other option is starvation. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are dying—a number from lack of food, others submerging after plunging into water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. In a sense, the art is a memorial to them. "With the layering of materials, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

This artwork also emphasizes the stark difference between the modern interpretation of electricity as a resource to be exploited for profit and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of life force as an natural essence in creatures, people, and nature. Tate Modern's past as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by regional governments. As they strive to be leaders for sustainable power, these states have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, water power facilities, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their legal protections, livelihoods, and traditions are threatened. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to stand your ground when the arguments are based on saving the world," Sara comments. "Extractivism has appropriated the rhetoric of sustainability, but yet it's just aiming to find alternative ways to persist in patterns of expenditure."

Family Conflicts

She and her family have personally clashed with the national administration over its ever-stricter policies on herding. Previously, Sara's sibling initiated a series of ultimately unsuccessful court actions over the required reduction of his herd, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara developed a four-year collection of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi including a massive drape of 400 animal bones, which was shown at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later purchased by the public gallery, where it hangs in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

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