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Visitors to Tate Modern are used to surprising encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've basked under an man-made sun, glided down amusement rides, and observed automated jellyfish floating through the air. But this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nasal passages of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this huge space—created by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a maze-like design based on the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Once inside, they can meander around or chill out on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to Sámi elders sharing stories and wisdom.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It might appear playful, but the installation honors a little-known scientific wonder: researchers have discovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the ambient air it breathes in by 80°C, enabling the creature to thrive in harsh Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "creates a feeling of inferiority that you as a individual are not superior over nature." The artist is a ex- reporter, young adult author, and environmental activist, who comes from a pastoral family in northern Norway. "Maybe that generates the chance to alter your viewpoint or evoke some humbleness," she continues.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The maze-like structure is part of a components in Sara's absorbing exhibition showcasing the culture, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They have faced discrimination, integration policies, and suppression of their language by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi belief system and founding narrative, the work also spotlights the people's struggles associated with the climate crisis, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Elements

On the extended access slope, there's a looming, 26-meter structure of skins entangled by electrical wires. It can be read as a metaphor for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part spiritual ascent, this section of the installation, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, whereby solid coatings of ice appear as varying temperatures liquefy and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' main winter nourishment, moss. This phenomenon is a outcome of climate change, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than in other regions.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a icy season and joined Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they transported containers of supplementary feed on to the barren Arctic plains to distribute through labor. These animals crowded round us, pawing the slippery ground in futility for mossy morsels. This costly and demanding process is having a severe effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. But the alternative is death. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—a number from starvation, others suffocating after sinking in lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the work is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Perspectives

The sculpture also emphasizes the clear contrast between the western view of power as a resource to be harnessed for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi outlook of life force as an natural life force in creatures, people, and the environment. Tate Modern's past as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by regional governments. As they strive to be exemplars for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have clashed with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, water power facilities, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and way of life are threatened. "It's challenging being such a limited population to defend yourself when the justifications are based on saving the world," Sara observes. "Extractivism has appropriated the discourse of sustainability, but yet it's just striving to find alternative ways to maintain habits of consumption."

Family Challenges

The artist and her relatives have personally clashed with the state authorities over its tightening rules on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's brother embarked on a set of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, apparently to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara produced a extended set of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi including a huge drape of 400 reindeer skulls, which was shown at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it resides in the lobby.

The Role of Art in Activism

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