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Guests to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual experiences in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an simulated sun, glided down spiral slides, and seen AI-powered sea creatures floating through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nose passages of a reindeer. The newest artistic project for this immense space—created by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes patrons into a maze-like structure modeled after the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Inside, they can stroll around or unwind on pelts, listening on earphones to community leaders imparting stories and insights.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It could appear playful, but the exhibit pays tribute to a rarely recognized biological feat: researchers have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the animal to thrive in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "generates a feeling of inferiority that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." Sara is a ex- journalist, children's author, and land defender, who hails from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Possibly that fosters the possibility to alter your perspective or spark some humbleness," she continues.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The labyrinthine design is part of a components in Sara's engaging art project celebrating the heritage, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They've endured persecution, forced assimilation, and suppression of their tongue by all four nations. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the installation also draws attention to the people's challenges associated with the global warming, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Components

At the extended entrance slope, there's a looming, 26-metre structure of pelts ensnared by electrical wires. It serves as a analogy for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this part of the installation, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an harsh environmental condition, whereby thick layers of ice develop as fluctuating conditions thaw and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary winter nourishment, moss. Goavvi is a consequence of planetary warming, which is occurring up to four times faster in the Arctic than globally.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a icy season and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in freezing temperatures as they carried carts of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to dispense through labor. These animals surrounded round us, digging the slippery ground in futility for vegetative pieces. This resource-intensive and demanding procedure is having a significant impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the choice is malnutrition. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—some from hunger, others suffocating after falling into streams through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the art is a tribute to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm introducing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

The sculpture also underscores the clear contrast between the industrial interpretation of power as a resource to be exploited for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi worldview of life force as an innate essence in animals, individuals, and the environment. The gallery's past as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by Nordic countries. While attempting to be exemplars for renewable energy, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the development of windfarms, river barriers, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and culture are threatened. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to stand your ground when the justifications are grounded in saving the world," Sara notes. "Extractivism has appropriated the discourse of environmentalism, but yet it's just striving to find more suitable ways to maintain patterns of expenditure."

Individual Challenges

She and her kin have personally disagreed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent regulations on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's sibling undertook a set of finally failed court actions over the required reduction of his animals, supposedly to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara produced a multi-year set of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge drape of four hundred animal bones, which was exhibited at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

Among the community, visual expression is the sole domain in which they can be understood by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|