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Guests to Tate Modern are used to surprising experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an man-made sun, glided down helter skelters, and witnessed robotic jellyfish hovering through the air. However this marks the first time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nose chambers of a reindeer. The newest artistic project for this cavernous space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a maze-like design modeled after the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Once inside, they can meander around or chill out on reindeer hides, tuning in on earphones to community leaders imparting tales and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It may sound quirky, but the exhibit celebrates a little-known biological feat: experts have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it breathes in by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the creature to survive in extreme Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara explains, "creates a sense of inferiority that you as a human being are not in control over nature." The artist is a ex- writer, young adult author, and rights advocate, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that fosters the chance to alter your viewpoint or spark some humility," she states.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The maze-like structure is among various components in Sara's engaging exhibition honoring the culture, science, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total about 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They've experienced persecution, integration policies, and eradication of their dialect by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the work also highlights the group's challenges connected to the climate crisis, property rights, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Components

At the long access ramp, there's a looming, 26-meter sculpture of pelts ensnared by electrical wires. It can be read as a metaphor for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part heavenly staircase, this component of the installation, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein thick sheets of ice appear as changing weather melt and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' main winter food, lichen. The condition is a result of global heating, which is happening up to four times faster in the Polar region than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in the Norwegian far north during a icy season and joined Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in freezing temperatures as they carried containers of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to dispense through labor. These animals crowded round us, digging the frozen ground in vain for vegetative bits. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive method is having a significant impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the alternative is malnutrition. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—a number from starvation, others suffocating after sinking in lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the work is a monument to them. "With the layering of materials, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

This artwork also highlights the sharp divergence between the modern understanding of energy as a resource to be harnessed for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an innate life force in creatures, humans, and nature. The gallery's history as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi consider eco-imperialism by regional governments. While attempting to be standard bearers for renewable energy, Nordic nations have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of windfarms, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their traditional territory; the Sámi contend their legal protections, livelihoods, and traditions are at risk. "It's challenging being such a small minority to stand your ground when the justifications are grounded in environmental protection," Sara notes. "Mining practices has adopted the rhetoric of sustainability, but still it's just striving to find better ways to continue patterns of consumption."

Personal Struggles

The artist and her relatives have personally conflicted with the state authorities over its increasingly stringent rules on herding. A few years ago, Sara's brother embarked on a series of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a multi-year series of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi including a huge screen of numerous animal bones, which was displayed at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the national institution, where it resides in the entryway.

Art as Activism

For many Sámi, creative work seems the only domain in which they can be understood by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|