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Attendees to Tate Modern are accustomed to unusual encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They've basked under an simulated sun, glided down spiral slides, and seen automated sea creatures drifting through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nose chambers of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this huge space—developed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a winding construction based on the expanded inside of a reindeer's nasal passages. Upon entering, they can stroll around or unwind on skins, tuning in on earphones to tribal seniors imparting narratives and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It might sound playful, but the artwork honors a little-known natural marvel: scientists have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it breathes in by 80°C, helping the creature to survive in extreme Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara notes, "generates a sense of insignificance that you as a individual are not superior over nature." Sara is a former reporter, young adult author, and environmental activist, who hails from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that generates the possibility to alter your perspective or trigger some humility," she continues.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The winding installation is part of a elements in Sara's engaging art project honoring the traditions, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They have experienced discrimination, forced assimilation, and eradication of their dialect by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi mythology and origin tale, the installation also draws attention to the people's issues associated with the global warming, property rights, and colonialism.

Meaning in Components

At the extended entry slope, there's a looming, 26-meter formation of reindeer hides trapped by electrical wires. It serves as a analogy for the political and economic systems restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part heavenly staircase, this part of the artwork, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein solid layers of ice form as varying temperatures liquefy and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' primary winter food, moss. The condition is a outcome of climate change, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than globally.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in the Norwegian far north during a icy season and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they hauled carts of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to provide manually. The herd crowded round us, scratching the icy ground in vain for mossy pieces. This expensive and labour-intensive procedure is having a significant effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. However the other option is starvation. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are dying—a number from hunger, others drowning after falling into streams through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the work is a monument to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Perspectives

The installation also underscores the stark contrast between the western understanding of power as a asset to be exploited for profit and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of life force as an innate essence in animals, humans, and land. The gallery's history as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as eco-imperialism by Nordic countries. As they strive to be exemplars for sustainable power, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the development of wind energy projects, water power facilities, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and culture are threatened. "It's challenging being such a limited population to protect your rights when the justifications are rooted in environmental protection," Sara observes. "Extractivism has co-opted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but yet it's just striving to find more suitable ways to continue practices of expenditure."

Family Struggles

She and her family have themselves disagreed with the national administration over its ever-stricter rules on herding. Previously, Sara's sibling initiated a sequence of finally failed court actions over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara created a four-year set of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive curtain of 400 animal bones, which was shown at the the show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the public gallery, where it resides in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, art seems the only sphere in which they can be understood by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|