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Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to unexpected experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an simulated sun, slid down helter skelters, and seen robotic sea creatures hovering through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nose cavities of a reindeer. The latest artistic project for this huge space—developed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a labyrinthine construction based on the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nasal airways. Inside, they can stroll around or relax on skins, listening on earphones to community leaders imparting narratives and insights.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It might seem playful, but the artwork pays tribute to a little-known biological feat: scientists have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the surrounding air it takes in by 80°C, enabling the animal to thrive in harsh Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "produces a feeling of inferiority that you as a person are not dominant over nature." Sara is a ex- reporter, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Maybe that creates the possibility to change your viewpoint or spark some humbleness," she adds.

A Tribute to Indigenous Heritage

The winding design is part of a features in Sara's engaging commission showcasing the heritage, understanding, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They've faced oppression, forced assimilation, and eradication of their language by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the art also draws attention to the community's issues relating to the global warming, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Components

Along the lengthy access incline, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot formation of skins entangled by power and light cables. It serves as a metaphor for the societal frameworks restricting the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this section of the exhibit, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which solid coatings of ice develop as fluctuating weather thaw and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' key cold-season sustenance, fungus. Goavvi is a result of climate change, which is happening up to four times faster in the Far North than in other regions.

Previously, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they hauled trailers of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to provide manually. The reindeer surrounded round us, scratching the frozen ground in vain for vegetative pieces. This costly and demanding process is having a severe effect on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. However the alternative is starvation. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—a number from hunger, others submerging after falling into lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the work is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

The sculpture also emphasizes the sharp contrast between the modern understanding of electricity as a resource to be harnessed for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an natural life force in creatures, people, and land. Tate Modern's legacy as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by regional governments. In their efforts to be exemplars for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have clashed with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, river barriers, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their legal protections, incomes, and way of life are threatened. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to protect your rights when the arguments are grounded in environmental protection," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has adopted the discourse of ecology, but nonetheless it's just striving to find more suitable ways to maintain practices of expenditure."

Family Challenges

She and her relatives have themselves conflicted with the state authorities over its ever-stricter regulations on herding. In 2016, Sara's brother embarked on a set of unsuccessful legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara produced a multi-year set of creations called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge curtain of 400 reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later purchased by the national institution, where it is displayed in the lobby.

The Role of Art in Activism

Among the community, visual expression is the only domain in which they can be listened to by the global community. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|