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Attendees to Tate Modern are used to unexpected encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've basked under an simulated sun, glided down helter skelters, and seen AI-powered sea creatures drifting through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nose passages of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this huge space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes patrons into a winding design modeled after the expanded interior of a reindeer's nasal passages. Once inside, they can wander around or unwind on pelts, listening on headphones to Sámi elders imparting tales and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It may sound playful, but the artwork celebrates a rarely recognized natural marvel: researchers have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it takes in by 80°C, allowing the creature to survive in harsh Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "generates a perception of inferiority that you as a individual are not superior over nature." Sara is a ex- writer, children's author, and rights advocate, who hails from a herding family in northern Norway. "Maybe that creates the possibility to change your viewpoint or spark some modesty," she states.

A Tribute to Traditional Ways

The winding structure is among various components in Sara's engaging exhibition honoring the culture, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They've experienced discrimination, cultural suppression, and suppression of their tongue by all four nations. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the art also highlights the group's challenges connected to the climate crisis, property rights, and imperialism.

Meaning in Elements

At the long entry slope, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot sculpture of skins entangled by power and light cables. It can be read as a symbol for the societal frameworks restricting the Sámi. Part pylon, part spiritual ascent, this section of the exhibit, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, whereby dense sheets of ice appear as changing weather liquefy and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' main cold-season nourishment, moss. This phenomenon is a result of planetary warming, which is happening up to four times faster in the Arctic than globally.

Three years ago, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and went with Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they carried containers of supplementary feed on to the exposed frozen landscape to provide manually. These animals surrounded round us, digging the frozen ground in futility for mossy pieces. This resource-intensive and demanding method is having a drastic influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. However the other option is malnutrition. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are dying—some from lack of food, others submerging after falling into streams through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the work is a monument to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

The sculpture also highlights the stark difference between the western understanding of power as a commodity to be exploited for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an innate essence in creatures, individuals, and land. The gallery's history as a fossil fuel plant is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by Nordic countries. As they strive to be exemplars for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the development of wind energy projects, river barriers, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their human rights, livelihoods, and way of life are threatened. "It's challenging being such a small minority to stand your ground when the reasons are rooted in saving the world," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has adopted the language of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just striving to find alternative ways to continue habits of expenditure."

Personal Struggles

She and her kin have personally clashed with the state authorities over its ever-stricter regulations on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's brother embarked on a sequence of finally failed legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara developed a multi-year collection of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive curtain of four hundred cranial remains, which was displayed at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it resides in the entryway.

The Role of Art in Advocacy

For many Sámi, creative work seems the only domain in which they can be understood by the global community. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|