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Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to unexpected displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have basked under an artificial sun, descended down helter skelters, and witnessed AI-powered sea creatures hovering through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nasal passages of a reindeer. The latest artistic project for this cavernous space—developed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a maze-like structure modeled after the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nasal airways. Inside, they can stroll around or relax on skins, listening on headphones to community leaders telling narratives and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It may sound quirky, but the installation honors a little-known biological feat: scientists have found that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the creature to survive in harsh Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara notes, "generates a perception of smallness that you as a individual are not in control over nature." She is a former journalist, children's author, and land defender, who hails from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that fosters the potential to alter your perspective or evoke some humbleness," she adds.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The maze-like design is one of several components in Sara's engaging exhibition showcasing the culture, science, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They have experienced persecution, integration policies, and repression of their tongue by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the art also draws attention to the people's challenges relating to the global warming, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Materials

On the long entrance slope, there's a soaring, 26-meter sculpture of skins trapped by electrical wires. It serves as a symbol for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this component of the exhibit, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, in which thick sheets of ice develop as varying temperatures liquefy and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' key winter nourishment, fungus. This phenomenon is a consequence of planetary warming, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Far North than in other regions.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and went with Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they transported carts of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to provide by hand. These animals surrounded round us, digging the frozen ground in vain for lichen-covered bits. This resource-intensive and demanding procedure is having a significant impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. But the other option is starvation. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—a number from lack of food, others suffocating after sinking in 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 goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

The sculpture also underscores the clear contrast between the modern view of energy as a resource to be utilized for profit and survival and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an innate life force in animals, people, and the environment. Tate Modern's history as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by Nordic countries. As they strive to be standard bearers for renewable energy, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the construction of windfarms, hydroelectric dams, and mines on their traditional territory; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and traditions are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to defend yourself when the justifications are based on saving the world," Sara observes. "Extractivism has co-opted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but still it's just aiming to find alternative ways to continue patterns of expenditure."

Individual Conflicts

The artist and her kin have themselves clashed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent policies on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's sibling undertook a set of finally failed legal cases over the forced culling of his animals, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara produced a extended set of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal screen of four hundred cranial remains, which was shown at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Activism

Among the community, visual expression is the exclusive domain in which they can be understood by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|