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Guests to Tate Modern are accustomed to unusual encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have basked under an man-made sun, glided down spiral slides, and witnessed AI-powered sea creatures floating through the air. But this marks the inaugural time they will be immersing themselves in the detailed nose passages of a reindeer. The newest artistic project for this huge space—created by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a maze-like structure based on the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nose cavities. Inside, they can meander around or unwind on skins, listening on headphones to tribal seniors sharing narratives and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why choose the nasal structure? It might appear playful, but the exhibit honors a rarely recognized scientific wonder: scientists have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the ambient air it takes in by eighty degrees, helping the creature to thrive in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "creates a feeling of insignificance that you as a individual are not superior over nature." She is a former journalist, children's author, and environmental activist, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Possibly that generates the chance to shift your outlook or trigger some humility," she adds.

A Tribute to Traditional Ways

The winding design is one of several elements in Sara's engaging art project celebrating the heritage, science, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total about 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They've faced discrimination, integration policies, and suppression of their tongue by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the art also draws attention to the group's challenges connected to the climate crisis, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Elements

At the extended entrance slope, there's a soaring, 26-metre formation of reindeer hides trapped by electrical wires. It represents a metaphor for the societal frameworks constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this section of the installation, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, wherein thick coatings of ice appear as changing temperatures melt and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' main cold-season sustenance, lichen. Goavvi is a consequence of planetary warming, which is happening up to four times faster in the Arctic than globally.

Previously, I met with Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they carried trailers of food pellets on to the barren Arctic plains to dispense manually. The herd gathered round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain for vegetative pieces. This resource-intensive and demanding method is having a severe influence on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. However the other option is death. As these icy periods become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—a number from starvation, others suffocating after falling into lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. In a sense, the art is a monument to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

The sculpture also emphasizes the stark contrast between the western understanding of electricity as a asset to be exploited for gain and existence and the Sámi philosophy of life force as an natural power in animals, individuals, and land. The gallery's past as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be leaders for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of windfarms, water power facilities, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their legal protections, incomes, and culture are threatened. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to protect your rights when the reasons are rooted in global sustainability," Sara notes. "Extractivism has appropriated the rhetoric of ecology, but yet it's just striving to find more suitable ways to persist in habits of consumption."

Family Conflicts

She and her family have personally clashed with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent rules on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's sibling initiated a sequence of unsuccessful lawsuits over the forced culling of his animals, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara developed a extended set of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal screen of numerous reindeer skulls, which was shown at the the event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the national institution, where it resides in the entrance.

The Role of Art in Advocacy

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