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Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an man-made sun, slid down spiral slides, and witnessed robotic sea creatures floating through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the complex nose chambers of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this immense space—developed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a maze-like construction inspired by the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Once inside, they can wander around or chill out on skins, listening on headphones to community leaders sharing narratives and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

Why choose the nasal structure? It may sound quirky, but the installation honors a rarely recognized scientific wonder: experts have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the ambient air it inhales by eighty degrees, enabling the animal to endure in harsh Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara explains, "generates a sense of insignificance that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." Sara is a former journalist, writer for kids, and land defender, who hails from a herding family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that fosters the potential to change your viewpoint or spark some humility," she continues.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The maze-like design is part of a elements in Sara's immersive art project honoring the culture, science, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They've faced discrimination, cultural suppression, and eradication of their language by all four states. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the work also draws attention to the community's challenges connected to the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Elements

At the long entry incline, there's a looming, 26-metre sculpture of pelts entangled by power and light cables. It serves as a symbol for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this component of the artwork, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein solid sheets of ice form as fluctuating weather thaw and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary cold-season nourishment, lichen. Goavvi is a result of planetary warming, which is occurring up to four times faster in the Polar region than elsewhere.

Previously, I visited Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi herders on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they hauled trailers of food pellets on to the barren frozen landscape to distribute by hand. The herd crowded round us, pawing the slippery ground in futility for lichen-covered morsels. This resource-intensive and demanding process is having a severe impact on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. However the other option is death. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are perishing—a number from starvation, others drowning after plunging into water bodies through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the installation is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Perspectives

This artwork also emphasizes the clear divergence between the western interpretation of power as a commodity to be exploited for profit and existence and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an innate essence in animals, people, and nature. The gallery's legacy as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi consider environmental exploitation by regional governments. In their efforts to be exemplars for clean sources, these states have locked horns with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, water power facilities, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their legal protections, ways of life, and culture are threatened. "It's challenging being such a limited population to defend yourself when the arguments are grounded in saving the world," Sara comments. "Extractivism has co-opted the language of sustainability, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to continue habits of consumption."

Individual Struggles

The artist and her relatives have personally clashed with the Norwegian government over its tightening rules on herding. In 2016, Sara's brother undertook a sequence of unsuccessful legal cases over the forced culling of his herd, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara developed a four-year series of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a colossal screen of four hundred cranial remains, which was exhibited at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the entryway.

Art as Activism

For many Sámi, visual expression appears the only sphere in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|