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Guests to Tate Modern are familiar to unexpected encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an artificial sun, slid down spiral slides, and seen robotic sea creatures hovering through the air. Yet this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nose cavities of a reindeer. The latest artistic project for this immense space—developed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a labyrinthine structure modeled after the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nose cavities. Upon entering, they can wander around or relax on skins, listening on headphones to tribal seniors imparting narratives and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It could sound playful, but the installation celebrates a rarely recognized biological feat: experts have discovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it breathes in by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the animal to thrive in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "produces a feeling of insignificance that you as a person are not superior over nature." The artist is a ex- journalist, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who comes from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that fosters the chance to shift your viewpoint or evoke some humbleness," she states.

An Homage to Indigenous Heritage

The winding installation is among various features in Sara's absorbing art project honoring the heritage, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number roughly 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They have endured discrimination, forced assimilation, and eradication of their language by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi mythology and origin tale, the work also draws attention to the community's challenges relating to the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and external control.

Metaphor in Materials

On the lengthy entrance slope, there's a towering, eighty-five-foot formation of reindeer hides ensnared by electrical wires. It serves as a analogy for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this part of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, in which thick sheets of ice appear as changing weather melt and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary winter sustenance, moss. This phenomenon is a result of planetary warming, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Far North than in other regions.

Three years ago, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they hauled carts of food pellets on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to dispense manually. These animals surrounded round us, digging the frozen ground in vain attempts for vegetative morsels. This costly and demanding method is having a significant impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. Yet the alternative is death. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—some from lack of food, others suffocating after sinking in lakes and rivers through prematurely melting ice. To some extent, the work is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

This artwork also highlights the sharp difference between the western understanding of energy as a asset to be exploited for profit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of life force as an inherent life force in creatures, people, and the environment. The gallery's legacy as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be standard bearers for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have clashed with the Sámi over the construction of windfarms, river barriers, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi contend their legal protections, livelihoods, and way of life are threatened. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to stand your ground when the justifications are rooted in environmental protection," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the rhetoric of sustainability, but still it's just attempting to find alternative ways to maintain practices of expenditure."

Personal Conflicts

Sara and her kin have personally clashed with the state authorities over its ever-stricter regulations on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's brother undertook a series of finally failed legal cases over the forced culling of his livestock, supposedly to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara produced a extended collection of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge curtain of numerous reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the the event Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the entrance.

The Role of Art in Awareness

Among the community, art seems the sole realm in which they can be understood by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|