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Guests to Tate Modern are used to unusual experiences in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have basked under an simulated sun, slid down spiral slides, and seen robotic sea creatures drifting through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nasal chambers of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this cavernous space—created by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a winding structure inspired by the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nasal airways. Once inside, they can stroll around or unwind on pelts, listening on headphones to Sámi elders telling stories and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why the nose? It might seem whimsical, but the artwork celebrates a rarely recognized natural marvel: experts have discovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it breathes in by eighty degrees, enabling the creature to endure in extreme Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "generates a feeling of smallness that you as a individual are not superior over nature." The artist is a ex- reporter, writer for kids, and land defender, who hails from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that fosters the chance to change your outlook or trigger some humbleness," she states.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The winding design is one of several elements in Sara's immersive commission honoring the heritage, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They've faced oppression, forced assimilation, and eradication of their language by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the art also highlights the group's challenges relating to the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Materials

At the lengthy entrance slope, there's a looming, 26-metre structure of pelts entangled by utility lines. It serves as a analogy for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this part of the installation, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein dense sheets of ice form as varying conditions liquefy and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' main winter sustenance, lichen. This phenomenon is a result of global heating, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Polar region than elsewhere.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a icy season and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they transported trailers of food pellets on to the barren Arctic plains to dispense through labor. The herd gathered round us, scratching the icy ground in futility for mossy morsels. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive process is having a significant influence on herding practices—and on the animals' natural survival. However the choice is starvation. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are dying—a number from starvation, others drowning after plunging into water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. In a sense, the installation is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm introducing the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

This artwork also highlights the sharp divergence between the industrial understanding of energy as a asset to be exploited for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an natural power in animals, individuals, and nature. This venue's legacy as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by Nordic countries. While attempting to be standard bearers for renewable energy, these states have locked horns with the Sámi over the development of windfarms, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, livelihoods, and way of life are endangered. "It's challenging being such a limited population to defend yourself when the arguments are based on saving the world," Sara observes. "Mining practices has co-opted the discourse of sustainability, but yet it's just attempting to find alternative ways to persist in practices of use."

Individual Challenges

The artist and her family have personally disagreed with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter regulations on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's sibling initiated a set of finally failed court actions over the required reduction of his herd, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara developed a extended set of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge curtain of 400 reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it hangs in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

For many Sámi, creative work seems the exclusive realm in which they can be listened to by the global community. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|