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Visitors to Tate Modern are used to unusual encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an simulated sun, slid down amusement rides, and observed automated jellyfish hovering through the air. But this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nose passages of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this immense space—developed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes patrons into a winding design based on the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nose passages. Once inside, they can stroll around or chill out on pelts, listening on earphones to community leaders sharing narratives and insights.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It might sound whimsical, but the exhibit celebrates a obscure natural marvel: experts have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it takes in by eighty degrees, enabling the animal to thrive in extreme Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "produces a perception of smallness that you as a individual are not superior over nature." The artist is a former reporter, young adult author, and environmental activist, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Possibly that fosters the chance to shift your viewpoint or spark some modesty," she states.

An Homage to Indigenous Heritage

The winding design is among various features in Sara's absorbing art project showcasing the culture, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total about 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They've endured discrimination, integration policies, and repression of their language by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the art also highlights the community's challenges connected to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and external control.

Symbolism in Materials

At the lengthy entrance slope, there's a looming, 26-meter sculpture of skins ensnared by utility lines. It serves as a symbol for the societal frameworks constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this section of the artwork, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, wherein thick coatings of ice appear as changing conditions liquefy and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' main cold-season food, moss. Goavvi is a outcome of global heating, which is taking place up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than in other regions.

Previously, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and joined Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they carried carts of supplementary feed on to the exposed tundra to provide by hand. The herd crowded round us, pawing the slippery ground in futility for mossy morsels. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive procedure is having a significant effect on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. Yet the other option is starvation. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—a number from lack of food, others submerging after plunging into lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the art is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm introducing the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

The installation also emphasizes the clear difference between the industrial view of energy as a commodity to be utilized for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of life force as an natural essence in animals, humans, and nature. Tate Modern's past as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be leaders for clean sources, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of windfarms, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi argue their legal protections, livelihoods, and way of life are endangered. "It's hard being such a limited population to stand your ground when the reasons are based on environmental protection," Sara notes. "Mining practices has appropriated the rhetoric of ecology, but nonetheless it's just attempting to find better ways to maintain practices of use."

Individual Challenges

The artist and her family have themselves conflicted with the national administration over its increasingly stringent rules on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's sibling initiated a set of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, apparently to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a multi-year set of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal curtain of four hundred cranial remains, which was displayed at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later purchased by the national institution, where it resides in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, art appears the sole realm in which they can be listened to by outsiders. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|