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Visitors to Tate Modern are accustomed to unexpected experiences in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've basked under an simulated sun, slid down helter skelters, and observed robotic jellyfish floating through the air. Yet this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nasal cavities of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this immense space—created by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a labyrinthine design modeled after the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nasal passages. Once inside, they can wander around or relax on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to community leaders telling stories and insights.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It could appear whimsical, but the exhibit honors a obscure biological feat: scientists have discovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it inhales by 80°C, enabling the creature to endure in harsh Arctic climates. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "produces a feeling of insignificance that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." Sara is a ex- reporter, young adult author, and land defender, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Possibly that fosters the potential to alter your perspective or trigger some modesty," she states.

An Homage to Indigenous Heritage

The winding installation is among various components in Sara's immersive exhibition honoring the heritage, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They have endured persecution, cultural suppression, and repression of their language by all four states. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi belief system and founding narrative, the work also spotlights the people's challenges relating to the climate crisis, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Elements

Along the long access slope, there's a soaring, 26-metre sculpture of reindeer hides trapped by power and light cables. It represents a analogy for the societal frameworks constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part heavenly staircase, this component of the installation, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an harsh environmental condition, whereby dense sheets of ice develop as varying temperatures melt and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' key cold-season sustenance, fungus. Goavvi is a outcome of global heating, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than elsewhere.

Previously, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they carried carts of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to distribute manually. The herd crowded round us, digging the icy ground in vain for lichen-covered pieces. This costly and labour-intensive method is having a drastic influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. But the alternative is malnutrition. As these icy periods become frequent, reindeer are dying—a number from starvation, others suffocating after plunging into water bodies through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the art is a monument to them. "With the layering of materials, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

The installation also underscores the sharp difference between the modern view of energy as a asset to be exploited for gain and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of life force as an inherent power in animals, humans, and the environment. The gallery's history as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider eco-imperialism by regional governments. As they strive to be standard bearers for renewable energy, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, water power facilities, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their human rights, livelihoods, and culture are threatened. "It's hard being such a small minority to stand your ground when the arguments are grounded in global sustainability," Sara comments. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the rhetoric of sustainability, but yet it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to continue practices of use."

Individual Struggles

Sara and her family have themselves conflicted with the Norwegian government over its tightening regulations on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's sibling undertook a sequence of unsuccessful court actions over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, apparently to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara created a four-year series of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal drape of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the lobby.

Art as Awareness

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