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Attendees to Tate Modern are familiar to surprising displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have basked under an artificial sun, slid down spiral slides, and observed AI-powered sea creatures drifting through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be immersing themselves in the complex nose chambers of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this huge space—developed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes patrons into a winding structure inspired by the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nasal passages. Inside, they can meander around or unwind on skins, listening on earphones to community leaders sharing stories and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It might sound quirky, but the installation celebrates a obscure scientific wonder: researchers have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it breathes in by 80°C, allowing the creature to endure in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "creates a sense of smallness that you as a person are not in control over nature." She is a former reporter, young adult author, and land defender, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Possibly that generates the potential to shift your perspective or spark some modesty," she continues.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The winding installation is part of a components in Sara's immersive exhibition showcasing the heritage, knowledge, and philosophy of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number roughly 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They've faced oppression, forced assimilation, and eradication of their dialect by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the work also draws attention to the community's issues relating to the global warming, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Elements

At the long entry ramp, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot structure of reindeer hides trapped by electrical wires. It can be read as a symbol for the societal frameworks restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this section of the artwork, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby thick sheets of ice develop as varying weather thaw and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' key cold-season nourishment, lichen. Goavvi is a outcome of planetary warming, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Far North than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a icy season and joined Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they carried carts of animal nutrition on to the barren tundra to provide manually. These animals crowded round us, pawing the slippery ground in futility for vegetative pieces. This expensive and labour-intensive procedure is having a severe impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the alternative is malnutrition. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—some from starvation, others drowning after plunging into water bodies through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the work is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of elements, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

This artwork also emphasizes the sharp contrast between the western view of energy as a resource to be exploited for profit and existence and the Sámi worldview of life force as an inherent essence in animals, people, and land. The gallery's past as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi consider eco-imperialism by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be standard bearers for clean sources, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, river barriers, and mines on their traditional territory; the Sámi argue their human rights, incomes, and culture are endangered. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the justifications are grounded in environmental protection," Sara observes. "Extractivism has co-opted the rhetoric of ecology, but yet it's just aiming to find alternative ways to persist in patterns of use."

Personal Challenges

She and her family have personally disagreed with the state authorities over its ever-stricter policies on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's sibling embarked on a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the required reduction of his livestock, apparently to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara produced a four-year series of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge drape of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the the event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the entrance.

The Role of Art in Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, visual expression is the sole sphere in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|