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Visitors to Tate Modern are accustomed to unexpected displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They've basked under an artificial sun, descended down helter skelters, and observed robotic jellyfish floating through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nasal passages of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this immense space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a labyrinthine construction inspired by the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nasal passages. Upon entering, they can wander around or chill out on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to tribal seniors imparting stories and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It might appear quirky, but the installation honors a rarely recognized natural marvel: researchers have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it breathes in by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the animal to thrive in harsh Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "generates a perception of inferiority that you as a individual are not superior over nature." The artist is a ex- writer, children's author, and environmental activist, who hails from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that fosters the possibility to shift your perspective or evoke some humbleness," she adds.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The winding design is among various components in Sara's immersive exhibition celebrating the heritage, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total about 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They've faced discrimination, integration policies, and eradication of their tongue by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the art also draws attention to the community's issues associated with the global warming, loss of territory, and external control.

Metaphor in Materials

Along the long access incline, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot structure of reindeer hides trapped by electrical wires. It serves as a symbol for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this component of the artwork, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which dense layers of ice appear as fluctuating conditions melt and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' main winter food, moss. Goavvi is a consequence of planetary warming, which is occurring up to four times faster in the Polar region than in other regions.

A few years back, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they transported containers of animal nutrition on to the exposed frozen landscape to dispense by hand. The herd gathered round us, digging the frozen ground in vain attempts for lichen-covered morsels. This expensive and laborious process is having a drastic influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. But the choice is malnutrition. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are dying—a number from hunger, others drowning after falling into streams through prematurely melting ice. To some extent, the art is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of elements, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

The installation also emphasizes the clear contrast between the western understanding of electricity as a resource to be exploited for profit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of life force as an natural life force in animals, humans, and land. This venue's legacy as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by Nordic countries. In their efforts to be standard bearers for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their human rights, incomes, and traditions are endangered. "It's hard being such a small minority to stand your ground when the reasons are grounded in environmental protection," Sara notes. "Extractivism has co-opted the rhetoric of ecology, but yet it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to continue patterns of consumption."

Personal Struggles

The artist and her kin have personally clashed with the state authorities over its increasingly stringent policies on animal husbandry. Previously, Sara's brother embarked on a series of finally failed court actions over the required reduction of his animals, apparently to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara developed a extended set of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge curtain of 400 reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it resides in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, visual expression is the sole domain in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|