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Attendees to Tate Modern are accustomed to surprising displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an man-made sun, slid down spiral slides, and witnessed robotic sea creatures floating through the air. But this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The current artist commission for this huge space—created by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a winding design inspired by the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Upon entering, they can meander around or chill out on skins, listening on earphones to tribal seniors sharing narratives and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

Why choose the nasal structure? It could sound whimsical, but the artwork celebrates a rarely recognized biological feat: researchers have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, helping the animal to endure in harsh Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "produces a feeling of insignificance that you as a person are not superior over nature." The artist is a ex- writer, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who comes from a pastoral family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that fosters the chance to alter your viewpoint or trigger some humility," she adds.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The maze-like installation is one of several features in Sara's immersive exhibition celebrating the culture, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number about 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They have faced discrimination, cultural suppression, and suppression of their dialect by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the art also spotlights the community's issues connected to the global warming, property rights, and imperialism.

Meaning in Materials

At the extended access ramp, there's a soaring, 26-meter formation of skins entangled by utility lines. It serves as a analogy for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this component of the artwork, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi word for an severe climatic event, in which solid layers of ice appear as fluctuating weather liquefy and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary winter food, fungus. This phenomenon is a result of global heating, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than elsewhere.

A few years back, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi herders on their motorized sleds in freezing temperatures as they transported containers of food pellets on to the wind-scoured tundra to distribute through labor. These animals surrounded round us, pawing the slippery ground in futility for vegetative pieces. This costly and labour-intensive procedure is having a drastic impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the alternative is starvation. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are dying—some from starvation, others submerging after falling into streams through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the installation is a monument to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

The installation also highlights the clear difference between the industrial interpretation of electricity as a resource to be utilized for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi worldview of energy as an natural life force in creatures, humans, and land. Tate Modern's legacy as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by regional governments. While attempting to be leaders for sustainable power, these states have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, river barriers, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and culture are threatened. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to stand your ground when the justifications are rooted in environmental protection," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has adopted the discourse of sustainability, but still it's just aiming to find alternative ways to continue habits of consumption."

Individual Struggles

Sara and her kin have themselves clashed with the state authorities over its increasingly stringent policies on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's brother undertook a sequence of unsuccessful legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a extended set of creations named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal drape of 400 reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it resides in the lobby.

Art as Activism

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