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Guests to Tate Modern are accustomed to unexpected encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an man-made sun, slid down helter skelters, and seen AI-powered sea creatures drifting through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nasal chambers of a reindeer. The newest artistic project for this immense space—designed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes patrons into a maze-like structure modeled after the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nasal passages. Inside, they can stroll around or unwind on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to tribal seniors imparting narratives and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It could appear playful, but the exhibit honors a obscure scientific wonder: experts have discovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the animal to thrive in harsh Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "creates a sense of insignificance that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." Sara is a ex- writer, writer for kids, and land defender, who hails from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that fosters the chance to change your outlook or evoke some humbleness," she states.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The labyrinthine design is one of several elements in Sara's absorbing art project showcasing the heritage, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number about 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They've endured persecution, forced assimilation, and repression of their dialect by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the art also highlights the people's challenges relating to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and external control.

Meaning in Components

Along the lengthy access ramp, there's a towering, 26-meter sculpture of reindeer hides trapped by electrical wires. It serves as a analogy for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this component of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which dense layers of ice appear as fluctuating temperatures liquefy and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' main cold-season sustenance, moss. This phenomenon is a outcome of planetary warming, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than globally.

A few years back, I visited Sara in a remote town during a icy season and joined Sámi herders on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they carried trailers of food pellets on to the exposed tundra to distribute by hand. The reindeer surrounded round us, digging the frozen ground in vain for vegetative bits. This expensive and demanding process is having a drastic influence on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. Yet the choice is starvation. As these icy periods become routine, reindeer are succumbing—a number from hunger, others suffocating after plunging into lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the work is a monument to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm introducing the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Perspectives

The installation also underscores the sharp divergence between the industrial understanding of electricity as a commodity to be exploited for profit and existence and the Sámi outlook of life force as an natural life force in creatures, individuals, and land. The gallery's history as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by Nordic countries. While attempting to be leaders for sustainable power, these states have locked horns with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi assert their legal protections, livelihoods, and traditions are threatened. "It's hard being such a small minority to stand your ground when the arguments are based on environmental protection," Sara notes. "Extractivism has appropriated the discourse of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just attempting to find alternative ways to continue patterns of consumption."

Individual Struggles

Sara and her relatives have themselves conflicted with the state authorities over its tightening regulations on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's sibling undertook a sequence of unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, supposedly to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara produced a four-year collection of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi including a massive curtain of numerous animal bones, which was exhibited at the 2017's art exhibition Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the entryway.

Art as Advocacy

For numerous Indigenous people, art is the exclusive domain in which they can be understood by the global community. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|