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Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an artificial sun, slid down spiral slides, and seen automated sea creatures drifting through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nose chambers of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this huge space—developed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a labyrinthine design based on the expanded inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Once inside, they can stroll around or unwind on pelts, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors telling tales and insights.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why the nose? It might seem playful, but the artwork honors a rarely recognized natural marvel: researchers have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it inhales by eighty degrees, enabling the animal to endure in extreme Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "creates a feeling of insignificance that you as a individual are not superior over nature." Sara is a former writer, writer for kids, and environmental activist, who is from a pastoral family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that fosters the possibility to shift your outlook or trigger some humbleness," she continues.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The winding structure is part of a elements in Sara's immersive art project honoring the traditions, knowledge, and philosophy of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number roughly 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They've faced persecution, cultural suppression, and repression of their dialect by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the work also spotlights the people's struggles relating to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and external control.

Symbolism in Materials

Along the extended entrance incline, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot formation of pelts ensnared by utility lines. It represents a symbol for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this component of the artwork, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which solid sheets of ice appear as changing conditions thaw and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' main cold-season sustenance, moss. Goavvi is a consequence of climate change, which is occurring up to four times faster in the Polar region than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I met with Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and joined Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they transported trailers of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to dispense manually. These animals surrounded round us, pawing the slippery ground in futility for lichen-covered bits. This expensive and laborious method is having a significant effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. However the alternative is death. As goavvi winters become frequent, reindeer are perishing—a number from lack of food, others drowning after sinking in streams through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the work is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of elements, in a way I'm introducing the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

The installation also highlights the stark divergence between the western interpretation of electricity as a resource to be harnessed for profit and existence and the Sámi outlook of life force as an natural life force in animals, humans, and land. The gallery's legacy as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by regional governments. As they strive to be leaders for renewable energy, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, river barriers, and mines on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, livelihoods, and culture are threatened. "It's very difficult being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the reasons are based on global sustainability," Sara notes. "Extractivism has co-opted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but yet it's just aiming to find alternative ways to persist in habits of expenditure."

Family Struggles

Sara and her relatives have personally clashed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent policies on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's sibling embarked on a series of unsuccessful court actions over the forced culling of his herd, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara created a multi-year collection of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a colossal screen of numerous reindeer skulls, which was shown at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the lobby.

Art as Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work appears the exclusive domain in which they can be heard by outsiders. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|