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Attendees to Tate Modern are familiar to surprising encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an simulated sun, glided down spiral slides, and witnessed AI-powered sea creatures drifting through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be immersing themselves in the complex nasal cavities of a reindeer. The newest artistic project for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a winding structure inspired by the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nasal passages. Once inside, they can wander around or chill out on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to Sámi elders telling stories and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It might appear playful, but the installation pays tribute to 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°C, helping the creature to survive in harsh Arctic conditions. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "generates a feeling of insignificance that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." Sara is a former reporter, young adult author, and land defender, who comes from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that generates the chance to alter your outlook or trigger some humbleness," she continues.

A Tribute to Traditional Ways

The winding structure is one of several components in Sara's engaging exhibition honoring the traditions, science, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They've faced persecution, cultural suppression, and suppression of their language by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the installation also highlights the community's struggles relating to the climate crisis, land dispossession, and external control.

Meaning in Materials

Along the long entrance incline, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot structure of pelts entangled by utility lines. It represents a metaphor for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this component of the installation, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, whereby dense sheets of ice form as fluctuating conditions liquefy and ice over the snow, locking in the reindeers' key cold-season sustenance, lichen. The condition is a outcome of global heating, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than globally.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and went with Sámi herders on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they carried carts of food pellets on to the barren tundra to dispense by hand. These animals surrounded round us, scratching the icy ground in vain attempts for mossy morsels. This resource-intensive and laborious process is having a drastic effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the other option is malnutrition. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are dying—some from starvation, others submerging after falling into water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the installation is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm introducing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

This artwork also highlights the stark divergence between the modern interpretation of power as a commodity to be harnessed for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an inherent life force in animals, humans, and land. This venue's history as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by regional governments. While attempting to be leaders for clean sources, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their human rights, incomes, and traditions are threatened. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to stand your ground when the justifications are rooted in saving the world," Sara comments. "Mining practices has co-opted the discourse of sustainability, but still it's just striving to find more suitable ways to continue practices of consumption."

Personal Conflicts

The artist and her kin have personally conflicted with the national administration over its ever-stricter rules on herding. A few years ago, Sara's brother undertook a series of finally failed legal cases over the required reduction of his livestock, apparently to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a extended collection of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive drape of numerous reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the the event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For many Sámi, art seems the exclusive realm in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|