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Attendees to Tate Modern are used to unexpected displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an simulated sun, descended down helter skelters, and observed AI-powered sea creatures drifting through the air. However this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nose passages of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this huge space—developed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a maze-like construction modeled after the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose cavities. Inside, they can stroll around or relax on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to tribal seniors sharing narratives and knowledge.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why the nose? It might seem playful, but the exhibit honors a little-known scientific wonder: scientists have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the ambient air it breathes in by eighty degrees, helping the animal to survive in harsh Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "creates a perception of insignificance that you as a individual are not in control over nature." Sara is a ex- reporter, young adult author, and land defender, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Possibly that creates the potential to shift your outlook or trigger some humility," she adds.

A Tribute to Indigenous Heritage

The maze-like installation is one of several features in Sara's absorbing art project celebrating the traditions, science, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total about 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They've endured oppression, cultural suppression, and eradication of their tongue by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the art also highlights the group's issues connected to the environmental emergency, property rights, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Elements

At the extended access slope, there's a looming, 26-metre structure of skins entangled by electrical wires. It serves as a symbol for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this component of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, in which dense sheets of ice form as fluctuating weather melt and ice over the snow, locking in the reindeers' key winter nourishment, lichen. This phenomenon is a result of climate change, which is happening up to four times faster in the Arctic than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they carried trailers of food pellets on to the exposed frozen landscape to dispense through labor. The reindeer surrounded round us, scratching the slippery ground in vain attempts for vegetative pieces. This expensive and labour-intensive procedure is having a severe effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. But the choice is death. As these icy periods become frequent, reindeer are perishing—some from lack of food, others suffocating after plunging into water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. In a sense, the installation is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

The sculpture also highlights the stark divergence between the western view of power as a asset to be harnessed for profit and survival and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an natural essence in animals, people, and nature. This venue's past as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be exemplars for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have clashed with the Sámi over the development of wind energy projects, river barriers, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and way of life are at risk. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to stand your ground when the arguments are based on global sustainability," Sara notes. "Mining practices has appropriated the discourse of environmentalism, but yet it's just striving to find more suitable ways to maintain practices of expenditure."

Personal Challenges

Sara and her kin have personally disagreed with the national administration over its tightening regulations on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's brother initiated a sequence of finally failed lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, supposedly to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara developed a extended series of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive curtain of 400 animal bones, which was shown at the the show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it is displayed in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

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