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Attendees to Tate Modern are accustomed to surprising encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an man-made sun, descended down amusement rides, and witnessed automated jellyfish drifting through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nose chambers of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this immense space—created by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a winding structure modeled after the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Inside, they can wander around or relax on skins, listening on headphones to tribal seniors sharing stories and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It may appear playful, but the exhibit celebrates a obscure scientific wonder: researchers have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it inhales by eighty degrees, enabling the creature to endure in harsh Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "creates a perception of smallness that you as a person are not dominant over nature." Sara is a ex- journalist, young adult author, and rights advocate, who is from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that creates the possibility to alter your viewpoint or evoke some humbleness," she adds.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The labyrinthine installation is among various elements in Sara's engaging art project celebrating the culture, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number about 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They have faced discrimination, cultural suppression, and suppression of their language by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the art also spotlights the group's struggles connected to the environmental emergency, property rights, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Elements

Along the extended entry slope, there's a looming, 26-meter structure of skins entangled by power and light cables. It serves as a analogy for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this part of the exhibit, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein dense coatings of ice develop as fluctuating weather thaw and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' key cold-season sustenance, fungus. The condition is a outcome of global heating, which is happening up to four times faster in the Far North than in other regions.

A few years back, I met with Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in freezing temperatures as they hauled trailers of food pellets on to the barren tundra to provide by hand. The herd surrounded round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain for vegetative bits. This costly and demanding process is having a significant impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the alternative is death. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are succumbing—some from starvation, others drowning after plunging into lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the work is a monument to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

This artwork also underscores the stark divergence between the modern interpretation of power as a asset to be exploited for profit and existence and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an innate essence in animals, people, and land. The gallery's legacy as a fossil fuel plant is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as eco-imperialism by regional governments. As they strive to be exemplars for renewable energy, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the building of windfarms, water power facilities, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their human rights, ways of life, and culture are at risk. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to stand your ground when the arguments are rooted in environmental protection," Sara notes. "Extractivism has co-opted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find better ways to continue habits of consumption."

Individual Conflicts

Sara and her relatives have themselves conflicted with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter regulations on herding. A few years ago, Sara's sibling undertook a set of unsuccessful legal cases over the forced culling of his animals, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara produced a extended series of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a colossal drape of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the 2017 event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the public gallery, where it hangs in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Awareness

Among the community, creative work appears the only domain in which they can be heard by the global community. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|