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Guests to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an artificial sun, slid down amusement rides, and witnessed automated sea creatures hovering through the air. However this marks the first time they will be immersing themselves in the detailed nose chambers of a reindeer. The current artist commission for this cavernous space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a maze-like design based on the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nose passages. Inside, they can stroll around or relax on reindeer hides, tuning in on earphones to tribal seniors imparting narratives and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It could appear playful, but the installation pays tribute to a obscure scientific wonder: experts have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it breathes in by eighty degrees, enabling the creature to survive in harsh Arctic climates. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "generates a feeling of insignificance that you as a person are not in control over nature." The artist is a ex- journalist, children's author, and environmental activist, who is from a herding family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that fosters the chance to shift your viewpoint or trigger some modesty," she adds.

A Tribute to Indigenous Heritage

The maze-like design is among various components in Sara's absorbing exhibition honoring the culture, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They have faced discrimination, integration policies, and eradication of their tongue by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the work also spotlights the people's issues associated with the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Meaning in Materials

Along the long entrance ramp, there's a soaring, 26-metre formation of reindeer hides trapped by power and light cables. It serves as a symbol for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this component of the artwork, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein solid sheets of ice appear as changing temperatures liquefy and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary cold-season sustenance, lichen. This phenomenon is a result of planetary warming, which is taking place up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than in other regions.

Previously, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a icy season and went with Sámi herders on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they carried trailers of animal nutrition on to the barren frozen landscape to provide manually. These animals crowded round us, pawing the icy ground in vain attempts for mossy pieces. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive method is having a severe influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the alternative is malnutrition. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—some from starvation, others drowning after plunging into streams through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the art is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

This artwork also highlights the sharp difference between the western understanding of power as a commodity to be exploited for profit and existence and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an natural power in creatures, individuals, and the environment. Tate Modern's past as a fossil fuel plant is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by regional governments. In their efforts to be leaders for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, river barriers, and mines on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and culture are threatened. "It's hard being such a limited population to protect your rights when the reasons are rooted in global sustainability," Sara comments. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the discourse of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to continue practices of expenditure."

Personal Struggles

The artist and her relatives have themselves clashed with the Norwegian government over its tightening policies on herding. Previously, Sara's sibling initiated a sequence of unsuccessful legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, supposedly to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara created a four-year set of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge screen of 400 animal bones, which was shown at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it resides in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, art is the sole domain in which they can be heard by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|