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Guests to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an man-made sun, glided down spiral slides, and observed automated jellyfish floating through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nasal cavities of a reindeer. The newest artistic project for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a labyrinthine construction inspired by the expanded inside of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Inside, they can stroll around or unwind on pelts, tuning in on earphones to tribal seniors sharing narratives and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It might appear playful, but the artwork pays tribute to a rarely recognized biological feat: scientists have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it takes in by 80°C, allowing the animal to endure in harsh Arctic conditions. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "generates a perception of smallness that you as a person are not dominant over nature." Sara is a former reporter, writer for kids, and land defender, who comes from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that fosters the possibility to shift your perspective or evoke some humbleness," she adds.

An Homage to Indigenous Heritage

The labyrinthine installation is among various components in Sara's engaging exhibition honoring the heritage, science, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They have faced discrimination, cultural suppression, and suppression of their language by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi belief system and founding narrative, the art also spotlights the community's struggles associated with the global warming, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Components

On the extended entry slope, there's a towering, 26-meter sculpture of pelts ensnared by power and light cables. It serves as a analogy for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this component of the installation, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi word for an severe climatic event, in which thick sheets of ice develop as changing weather melt and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' main winter sustenance, moss. This phenomenon is a consequence of global heating, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Far North than in other regions.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and joined Sámi herders on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they transported carts of supplementary feed on to the exposed tundra to distribute through labor. The reindeer surrounded round us, scratching the slippery ground in vain for mossy bits. This expensive and labour-intensive process is having a drastic impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the choice is malnutrition. As these icy periods become routine, reindeer are dying—a number from hunger, others drowning after plunging into lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the installation is a monument to them. "With the layering of materials, in a way I'm introducing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

This artwork also highlights the sharp difference between the industrial interpretation of energy as a resource to be utilized for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an innate essence in animals, individuals, and the environment. This venue's past as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by Nordic countries. As they strive to be exemplars for clean sources, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, river barriers, and extraction sites on their traditional territory; the Sámi contend their human rights, incomes, and traditions are endangered. "It's hard being such a small minority to defend yourself when the arguments are grounded in global sustainability," Sara notes. "Mining practices has adopted the language of sustainability, but still it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to maintain practices of consumption."

Individual Challenges

The artist and her kin have themselves clashed with the Norwegian government over its tightening rules on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's sibling embarked on a sequence of unsuccessful legal cases over the required reduction of his animals, apparently to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara produced a extended series of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi including a huge curtain of numerous animal bones, which was displayed at the the show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it is displayed in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Awareness

Among the community, visual expression is the exclusive realm in which they can be heard by outsiders. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|