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Visitors to Tate Modern are accustomed to surprising experiences in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an simulated sun, descended down helter skelters, and observed automated jellyfish hovering through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nasal cavities of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this immense space—developed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a winding structure based on the expanded inside of a reindeer's nasal airways. Inside, they can meander around or unwind on pelts, tuning in on headphones to community leaders telling stories and insights.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It may appear playful, but the installation honors a obscure natural marvel: experts have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it takes in by eighty degrees, helping the animal to thrive in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara notes, "produces a feeling of inferiority that you as a individual are not superior over nature." She is a former reporter, children's author, and rights advocate, who is from a reindeer-herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Maybe that creates the possibility to alter your outlook or evoke some humility," she states.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The labyrinthine installation is part of a features in Sara's immersive commission honoring the heritage, knowledge, and philosophy of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi count about 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 endured oppression, forced assimilation, and suppression of their tongue by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi belief system and founding narrative, the installation also highlights the community's struggles connected to the global warming, property rights, and external control.

Symbolism in Components

Along the lengthy entry incline, there's a towering, eighty-five-foot formation of reindeer hides ensnared by utility lines. It can be read as a symbol for the political and economic systems restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this part of the artwork, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, in which solid coatings of ice appear as fluctuating weather melt and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' key cold-season sustenance, fungus. This phenomenon is a consequence of climate change, which is happening up to four times faster in the Polar region than in other regions.

Previously, I met with Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they transported carts of animal nutrition on to the barren Arctic plains to distribute by hand. The herd gathered round us, scratching the frozen ground in futility for mossy pieces. This expensive and labour-intensive process is having a severe effect on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the alternative is starvation. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are succumbing—some from starvation, others suffocating after sinking in water bodies through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the work is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of elements, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

The sculpture also emphasizes the clear divergence between the industrial interpretation of power as a resource to be exploited for profit and survival and the Sámi outlook of life force as an inherent life force in animals, individuals, and the environment. Tate Modern's past as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider environmental exploitation by regional governments. As they strive to be standard bearers for sustainable power, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, river barriers, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their human rights, ways of life, and traditions are at risk. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to defend yourself when the reasons are based on environmental protection," Sara notes. "Extractivism has adopted the rhetoric of ecology, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find better ways to maintain habits of expenditure."

Personal Conflicts

Sara and her relatives have personally disagreed with the state authorities over its tightening rules on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's sibling initiated a sequence of finally failed legal cases over the required reduction of his livestock, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara produced a multi-year set of creations called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge drape of numerous reindeer skulls, which was shown at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it hangs in the entryway.

The Role of Art in Activism

For many Sámi, visual expression seems the sole realm in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|