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Visitors to Tate Modern are used to unexpected experiences in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an man-made sun, glided down spiral slides, and seen robotic sea creatures hovering through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nose cavities of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this cavernous space—created by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a winding structure inspired by the expanded interior of a reindeer's nasal passages. Once inside, they can wander around or chill out on pelts, listening on earphones to tribal seniors telling narratives and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It may sound whimsical, but the installation celebrates a rarely recognized biological feat: scientists have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it takes in by eighty degrees, helping the animal to thrive in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "produces a perception of smallness that you as a individual are not in control over nature." Sara is a ex- journalist, young adult author, and rights advocate, who hails from a pastoral family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that fosters the potential to change your outlook or spark some humbleness," she states.

An Homage to Indigenous Heritage

The maze-like design is part of a elements in Sara's engaging exhibition honoring the traditions, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They have endured discrimination, integration policies, and repression of their tongue by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the work also highlights the people's issues associated with the environmental emergency, property rights, and colonialism.

Meaning in Elements

At the long access slope, there's a soaring, 26-metre structure of pelts entangled by utility lines. It serves as a analogy for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this part of the artwork, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an harsh environmental condition, whereby dense layers of ice form as varying conditions thaw and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' main cold-season sustenance, moss. Goavvi is a outcome of planetary warming, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Polar region than globally.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they transported containers of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to distribute manually. The herd gathered round us, digging the slippery ground in vain attempts for vegetative morsels. This resource-intensive and laborious procedure is having a drastic effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. However the alternative is death. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are dying—some from lack of food, others drowning after sinking in streams through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the installation is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

The installation also highlights the stark divergence between the modern understanding of electricity as a commodity to be harnessed for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi philosophy of life force as an inherent power in creatures, people, and land. This venue's history as a fossil fuel plant is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by regional governments. As they strive to be leaders for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of windfarms, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their legal protections, ways of life, and traditions are threatened. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to defend yourself when the reasons are rooted in global sustainability," Sara notes. "Mining practices has co-opted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but yet it's just aiming to find better ways to maintain patterns of expenditure."

Family Struggles

The artist and her family have themselves disagreed with the state authorities over its ever-stricter regulations on herding. A few years ago, Sara's sibling embarked on a set of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, apparently to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara developed a extended series of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal curtain of four hundred animal bones, which was exhibited at the the show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it resides in the entrance.

The Role of Art in Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work seems the only realm in which they can be heard by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|