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Visitors to Tate Modern are accustomed to surprising experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an man-made sun, glided down helter skelters, and observed automated jellyfish drifting through the air. However this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nasal chambers of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this immense space—developed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a winding construction based on the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Inside, they can stroll around or unwind on skins, listening on earphones to Sámi elders sharing narratives and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It might appear playful, but the exhibit pays tribute to a obscure scientific wonder: scientists have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it takes in by 80°C, helping the animal to thrive in extreme Arctic climates. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "creates a perception of inferiority that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." The artist is a ex- writer, children's author, and land defender, who comes from a pastoral family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that creates the potential to alter your perspective or trigger some humility," she states.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The maze-like installation is one of several components in Sara's absorbing art project celebrating the heritage, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number about 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They've endured persecution, forced assimilation, and eradication of their dialect by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the art also draws attention to the community's issues relating to the climate crisis, property rights, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Materials

Along the long entry incline, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot sculpture of pelts trapped by power and light cables. It serves as a analogy for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part heavenly staircase, this section of the artwork, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi word for an severe climatic event, whereby dense coatings of ice develop as varying weather thaw and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' key cold-season food, lichen. The condition is a outcome of planetary warming, which is occurring up to four times faster in the Polar region than globally.

Previously, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi herders on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they carried trailers of animal nutrition on to the exposed tundra to provide through labor. The herd crowded round us, scratching the icy ground in vain for lichen-covered bits. This resource-intensive and demanding process is having a significant effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. But the alternative is death. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are dying—some from starvation, others suffocating after plunging into lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the art is a tribute to them. "With the layering of elements, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

This artwork also emphasizes the clear divergence between the modern view of electricity as a asset to be exploited for profit and survival and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an natural life force in creatures, humans, and nature. The gallery's history as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be leaders for clean sources, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi assert their legal protections, incomes, and traditions are at risk. "It's very difficult being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the reasons are grounded in saving the world," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but yet it's just striving to find more suitable ways to maintain practices of use."

Family Conflicts

She and her kin have personally conflicted with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter regulations on animal husbandry. Previously, Sara's brother initiated a set of unsuccessful court actions over the forced culling of his herd, apparently to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara created a multi-year set of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge drape of numerous animal bones, which was displayed at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it is displayed in the lobby.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For many Sámi, art seems the only domain in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|