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Attendees to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an simulated sun, slid down helter skelters, and seen robotic sea creatures floating through the air. Yet this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this huge space—designed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a labyrinthine structure based on the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose passages. Inside, they can stroll around or relax on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to tribal seniors imparting tales and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It might sound playful, but the artwork honors a rarely recognized scientific wonder: experts have discovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the ambient air it takes in by eighty degrees, helping the animal to survive in extreme Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "produces a perception of insignificance that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." She is a ex- writer, children's author, and rights advocate, who hails from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that fosters the potential to alter your viewpoint or evoke some modesty," she states.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The labyrinthine design is among various components in Sara's immersive exhibition celebrating the traditions, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They have endured discrimination, forced assimilation, and eradication of their dialect by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the installation also draws attention to the community's struggles connected to the global warming, loss of territory, and external control.

Metaphor in Elements

At the lengthy entry ramp, there's a towering, 26-metre formation of pelts ensnared by power and light cables. It represents a metaphor for the political and economic systems restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this section of the artwork, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby thick layers of ice form as fluctuating temperatures liquefy and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' key winter sustenance, moss. This phenomenon is a outcome of climate change, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Polar region than in other regions.

Three years ago, I met with Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and joined Sámi reindeer keepers on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they carried trailers of food pellets on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to provide manually. The reindeer surrounded round us, pawing the icy ground in futility for vegetative pieces. This resource-intensive and demanding procedure is having a drastic influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. But the alternative is death. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are dying—some from hunger, others suffocating after sinking in streams through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the installation is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

This artwork also highlights the sharp difference between the western view of energy as a resource to be harnessed for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an natural power in animals, humans, and nature. This venue's legacy as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by Nordic countries. As they strive to be standard bearers for clean sources, Nordic nations have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of windfarms, water power facilities, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and way of life are endangered. "It's challenging being such a limited population to stand your ground when the justifications are based on environmental protection," Sara comments. "Mining practices has adopted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just striving to find better ways to persist in practices of consumption."

Individual Struggles

The artist and her relatives have personally disagreed with the Norwegian government over its tightening regulations on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's brother undertook a sequence of unsuccessful court actions over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara developed a extended collection of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal curtain of 400 cranial remains, which was exhibited at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it resides in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work is the sole sphere in which they can be understood by the global community. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|