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Visitors to Tate Modern are accustomed to unexpected displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an artificial sun, glided down helter skelters, and seen robotic sea creatures floating through the air. However this marks the first time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nasal cavities of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this cavernous space—created by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a winding construction inspired by the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Upon entering, they can wander around or relax on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to community leaders imparting narratives and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

Why choose the nasal structure? It could sound playful, but the installation celebrates a obscure natural marvel: 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, enabling the creature to endure in extreme Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "generates a feeling of insignificance that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." The artist is a former reporter, young adult author, and land defender, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that generates the potential to alter your outlook or spark some humbleness," she states.

A Tribute to Traditional Ways

The labyrinthine installation is among various elements in Sara's engaging commission celebrating the culture, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They have experienced discrimination, integration policies, and eradication of their tongue by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the installation also highlights the people's challenges connected to the environmental emergency, property rights, and external control.

Metaphor in Elements

Along the extended entrance ramp, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot sculpture of skins ensnared by utility lines. It serves as a analogy for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this section of the installation, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, wherein dense sheets of ice form as changing conditions thaw and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' key winter sustenance, moss. Goavvi is a result of planetary warming, which is occurring up to four times faster in the Polar region than in other regions.

Previously, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a icy season and went with Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they hauled carts of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to distribute through labor. These animals surrounded round us, pawing the icy ground in vain for mossy morsels. This expensive and laborious process is having a severe effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the other option is starvation. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are perishing—some from lack of food, others drowning after falling into lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. In a sense, the art is a monument to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

This artwork also highlights the clear difference between the western understanding of electricity as a commodity to be harnessed for gain and survival and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an inherent essence in animals, people, and nature. The gallery's past as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by regional governments. In their efforts to be exemplars for clean sources, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, water power facilities, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi argue their human rights, livelihoods, and way of life are threatened. "It's challenging being such a limited population to stand your ground when the reasons are grounded in environmental protection," Sara notes. "Mining practices has appropriated the discourse of sustainability, but still it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to persist in habits of expenditure."

Personal Struggles

The artist and her kin have themselves disagreed with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent policies on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's brother undertook a sequence of unsuccessful lawsuits over the forced culling of his animals, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara developed a multi-year series of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive drape of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the the show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it is displayed in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work seems the sole domain in which they can be understood by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|