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Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to surprising displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They have basked under an man-made sun, descended down amusement rides, and witnessed AI-powered jellyfish floating through the air. Yet this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nose chambers of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this cavernous space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a winding construction modeled after the expanded inside of a reindeer's nose cavities. Inside, they can wander around or relax on pelts, tuning in on earphones to Sámi elders telling stories and knowledge.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why the nose? It could appear quirky, but the exhibit celebrates a little-known scientific wonder: researchers have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it breathes in by 80°C, allowing the creature to endure in inhospitable Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "produces a perception of inferiority that you as a individual are not in control over nature." She is a former writer, children's author, and land defender, who hails from a pastoral family in northern Norway. "Possibly that generates the chance to change your viewpoint or spark some humility," she continues.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The maze-like structure is one of several elements in Sara's absorbing exhibition honoring the traditions, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi count about 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They've endured persecution, forced assimilation, and eradication of their dialect by all four states. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the art also draws attention to the group's issues associated with the global warming, property rights, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Components

Along the lengthy entrance incline, there's a towering, 26-metre structure of pelts ensnared by electrical wires. It can be read as a metaphor for the political and economic systems restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this component of the exhibit, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, in which dense sheets of ice appear as varying weather thaw and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' key cold-season nourishment, lichen. Goavvi is a outcome of climate change, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Polar region than globally.

A few years back, I met with Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi herders on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they carried containers of animal nutrition on to the exposed frozen landscape to dispense by hand. The reindeer crowded round us, digging the frozen ground in futility for lichen-covered morsels. This expensive and laborious method is having a severe effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the alternative is starvation. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—a number from starvation, others suffocating after plunging into lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the installation is a monument to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

The installation also underscores the stark divergence between the western understanding of electricity as a resource to be exploited for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi worldview of energy as an inherent essence in creatures, humans, and nature. The gallery's legacy as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be standard bearers for sustainable power, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the development of windfarms, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their human rights, ways of life, and way of life are endangered. "It's challenging being such a small minority to protect your rights when the justifications are rooted in environmental protection," Sara observes. "Extractivism has appropriated the rhetoric of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just striving to find more suitable ways to persist in patterns of consumption."

Personal Struggles

Sara and her kin have personally disagreed with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter policies on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's sibling initiated a series of unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara produced a extended series of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi including a huge curtain of four hundred cranial remains, which was shown at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the entrance.

Art as Advocacy

For numerous Indigenous people, art is the exclusive domain in which they can be heard by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|