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Guests to Tate Modern are accustomed to surprising encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They've basked under an simulated sun, slid down spiral slides, and seen robotic sea creatures drifting through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be immersing themselves in the detailed nasal passages of a reindeer. The current artist commission for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a winding design modeled after the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nasal airways. Upon entering, they can wander around or relax on pelts, listening on earphones to Sámi elders sharing tales and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It might sound playful, but the exhibit pays tribute to a little-known scientific wonder: experts have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the ambient air it breathes in by 80°C, enabling the creature to thrive in inhospitable Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara notes, "produces a sense of smallness that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." She is a former journalist, children's author, and environmental activist, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that creates the possibility to change your viewpoint or trigger some modesty," she states.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The winding design is part of a features in Sara's absorbing art project celebrating the culture, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They have experienced discrimination, integration policies, and suppression of their dialect by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the work also spotlights the people's challenges relating to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Materials

On the long access slope, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot sculpture of reindeer hides ensnared by utility lines. It represents a metaphor for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this component of the artwork, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, whereby solid layers of ice develop as changing weather melt and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' key winter food, fungus. Goavvi is a outcome of planetary warming, which is taking place up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I met with Sara in a remote town during a icy season and joined Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they hauled trailers of supplementary feed on to the barren Arctic plains to provide through labor. The reindeer surrounded round us, pawing the icy ground in vain attempts for vegetative pieces. This expensive and demanding process is having a severe effect on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the other option is malnutrition. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are dying—some from starvation, others suffocating after sinking in lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the installation is a tribute to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

The installation also highlights the stark contrast between the modern understanding of electricity as a asset to be utilized for gain and existence and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an innate power in creatures, individuals, and land. Tate Modern's past as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by Nordic countries. In their efforts to be exemplars for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have clashed with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi argue their legal protections, ways of life, and traditions are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a tiny group to stand your ground when the arguments are grounded in global sustainability," Sara observes. "Extractivism has co-opted the language of sustainability, but still it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to maintain habits of use."

Personal Challenges

She and her family have personally clashed with the state authorities over its ever-stricter policies on animal husbandry. Previously, Sara's brother initiated a series of finally failed lawsuits over the forced culling of his animals, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara produced a multi-year series of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi including a huge drape of four hundred cranial remains, which was exhibited at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the lobby.

Art as Advocacy

For many Sámi, creative work seems the exclusive domain in which they can be listened to by outsiders. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|