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Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to surprising experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an simulated sun, slid down amusement rides, and witnessed robotic sea creatures floating through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nasal passages of a reindeer. The newest artistic project for this huge space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a winding construction based on the expanded inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Inside, they can meander around or chill out on pelts, listening on earphones to tribal seniors telling narratives and wisdom.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It could seem whimsical, but the exhibit honors a obscure natural marvel: researchers have discovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it takes in by eighty degrees, allowing the creature to endure in extreme Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "creates a feeling of smallness that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." Sara is a former writer, young adult author, and rights advocate, who is from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Possibly that generates the chance to change your viewpoint or trigger some humbleness," she states.

A Celebration to Indigenous Heritage

The maze-like structure is part of a features in Sara's engaging exhibition celebrating the heritage, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They have experienced oppression, integration policies, and eradication of their tongue by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi belief system and founding narrative, the work also highlights the people's struggles associated with the global warming, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Meaning in Elements

On the lengthy entry slope, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot sculpture of pelts entangled by electrical wires. It represents a analogy for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this part of the installation, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an harsh environmental condition, whereby solid sheets of ice form as varying temperatures thaw and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary winter sustenance, fungus. Goavvi is a consequence of global heating, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Arctic than globally.

Three years ago, I met with Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and went with Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they hauled containers of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to distribute by hand. The herd surrounded round us, digging the icy ground in futility for vegetative pieces. This costly and laborious procedure is having a drastic effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the alternative is malnutrition. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are dying—some from hunger, others suffocating after sinking in streams through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the work is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of elements, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Perspectives

The sculpture also highlights the sharp contrast between the industrial understanding of power as a resource to be utilized for profit and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of life force as an natural essence in creatures, humans, and land. This venue's history as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as eco-imperialism by regional governments. While attempting to be standard bearers for renewable energy, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of windfarms, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their human rights, livelihoods, and culture are threatened. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to stand your ground when the reasons are grounded in environmental protection," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the language of ecology, but yet it's just striving to find more suitable ways to continue patterns of use."

Family Challenges

She and her family have personally conflicted with the Norwegian government over its tightening policies on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's brother initiated a sequence of unsuccessful legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a four-year collection of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal screen of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the the show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it resides in the entrance.

Art as Activism

Among the community, visual expression appears the only realm in which they can be understood by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|