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Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to surprising experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an man-made sun, glided down helter skelters, and seen robotic sea creatures floating through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be immersing themselves in the complex nasal passages of a reindeer. The newest artistic project for this huge space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a maze-like construction inspired by the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Inside, they can meander around or chill out on reindeer hides, tuning in on headphones to Sámi elders imparting narratives and insights.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It could sound playful, but the installation honors a little-known scientific wonder: researchers have found that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the surrounding air it inhales by eighty degrees, enabling the creature to endure in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "produces a perception of inferiority that you as a human being are not superior over nature." Sara is a ex- journalist, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who comes from a pastoral family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that fosters the possibility to alter your viewpoint or trigger some modesty," she continues.

A Celebration to Indigenous Heritage

The labyrinthine structure is part of a components in Sara's absorbing art project showcasing the culture, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number about 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They've faced oppression, cultural suppression, and repression of their tongue by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the art also spotlights the group's issues relating to the global warming, land dispossession, and external control.

Meaning in Components

At the extended access slope, there's a towering, 26-metre structure of skins trapped by utility lines. It represents a metaphor for the political and economic systems restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this component of the artwork, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, wherein solid sheets of ice develop as fluctuating conditions liquefy and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' key cold-season nourishment, fungus. Goavvi is a outcome of climate change, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Far North than elsewhere.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and accompanied Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they transported containers of food pellets on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to provide manually. These animals gathered round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain for mossy pieces. This expensive and laborious procedure is having a severe impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the alternative is starvation. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are dying—some from lack of food, others submerging after sinking in lakes and rivers through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the art is a monument to them. "With the layering of materials, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Perspectives

This artwork also underscores the clear divergence between the western understanding of electricity as a resource to be utilized for gain and survival and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an inherent life force in animals, individuals, and land. Tate Modern's history as a fossil fuel plant is linked with this, as is what the Sámi consider environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be exemplars for clean sources, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of windfarms, river barriers, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their legal protections, ways of life, and way of life are at risk. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to stand your ground when the reasons are grounded in saving the world," Sara notes. "Extractivism has co-opted the language of ecology, but yet it's just striving to find better ways to persist in practices of expenditure."

Personal Challenges

She and her family have themselves conflicted with the national administration over its ever-stricter rules on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's sibling undertook a sequence of unsuccessful legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara developed a extended collection of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal curtain of 400 cranial remains, which was displayed at the 2017 event Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the entrance.

Art as Awareness

For many Sámi, art seems the exclusive domain in which they can be understood by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|