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Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've basked under an man-made sun, descended down amusement rides, and witnessed robotic jellyfish floating through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this huge space—created by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a labyrinthine design modeled after the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nasal passages. Inside, they can meander around or chill out on skins, listening on headphones to community leaders telling stories and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It may sound playful, but the exhibit celebrates a rarely recognized scientific wonder: experts have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the animal to thrive in extreme Arctic climates. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "generates a perception of inferiority that you as a individual are not in control over nature." She is a former writer, writer for kids, and environmental activist, who comes from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that fosters the chance to shift your viewpoint or trigger some humbleness," she continues.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The winding structure is one of several elements in Sara's engaging commission celebrating the traditions, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They have experienced discrimination, cultural suppression, and suppression of their tongue by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the art also spotlights the group's issues relating to the climate crisis, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Elements

Along the lengthy entrance ramp, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot formation of skins trapped by electrical wires. It represents a analogy for the societal frameworks restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this component of the artwork, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, wherein dense coatings of ice form as changing weather thaw and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' main cold-season food, moss. The condition is a outcome of global heating, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Polar region than globally.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a icy season and went with Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in freezing temperatures as they carried carts of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured tundra to dispense through labor. The reindeer gathered round us, pawing the icy ground in futility for mossy pieces. This costly and demanding process is having a significant influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the choice is malnutrition. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—a number from starvation, others drowning after sinking in streams through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the art is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Perspectives

The installation also highlights the stark contrast between the western understanding of electricity as a resource to be exploited for gain and existence and the Sámi outlook of energy as an innate life force in animals, humans, and nature. This venue's legacy as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be exemplars for clean sources, Nordic nations have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of windfarms, river barriers, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi contend their legal protections, incomes, and traditions are at risk. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to stand your ground when the justifications are based on saving the world," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the rhetoric of sustainability, but yet it's just attempting to find alternative ways to continue patterns of expenditure."

Family Struggles

The artist and her family have themselves conflicted with the state authorities over its ever-stricter rules on animal husbandry. Previously, Sara's brother undertook a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the forced culling of his herd, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a four-year collection of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi including a huge curtain of numerous animal bones, which was displayed at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it hangs in the lobby.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, visual expression is the exclusive sphere in which they can be understood by the global community. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|