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Guests to Tate Modern are used to surprising displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've basked under an man-made sun, descended down helter skelters, and observed robotic sea creatures hovering through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nose chambers of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this huge space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a winding construction inspired by the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose cavities. Upon entering, they can meander around or chill out on skins, listening on headphones to community leaders sharing stories and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It could seem quirky, but the artwork honors a rarely recognized scientific wonder: experts have discovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it breathes in by 80°C, helping the animal to thrive in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "generates a feeling of insignificance that you as a human being are not superior over nature." She is a ex- journalist, children's author, and land defender, who comes from a herding family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that generates the potential to alter your outlook or trigger some humility," she continues.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The winding design is one of several features in Sara's engaging exhibition honoring the culture, science, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They have endured persecution, cultural suppression, and repression of their tongue by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi belief system and founding narrative, the installation also draws attention to the group's challenges connected to the global warming, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Meaning in Components

On the long entrance ramp, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot structure of reindeer hides trapped by electrical wires. It represents a analogy for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this component of the installation, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an severe climatic event, whereby dense sheets of ice develop as changing conditions liquefy and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary cold-season food, fungus. The condition is a result of planetary warming, which is happening up to four times faster in the Arctic than globally.

Three years ago, I met with Sara in a remote town during a icy season and went with Sámi herders on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they transported containers of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to dispense manually. The herd gathered round us, scratching the frozen ground in vain attempts for mossy morsels. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive method is having a drastic impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. Yet the other option is starvation. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—some from hunger, others submerging after sinking in streams through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the work is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

This artwork also underscores the clear contrast between the modern interpretation of electricity as a resource to be utilized for profit and survival and the Sámi worldview of energy as an natural essence in animals, people, and land. The gallery's past as a fossil fuel plant is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be leaders for clean sources, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the construction of windfarms, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi contend their human rights, livelihoods, and traditions are at risk. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to defend yourself when the reasons are grounded in environmental protection," Sara observes. "Mining practices has appropriated the language of sustainability, but nonetheless it's just striving to find alternative ways to continue practices of consumption."

Individual Struggles

The artist and her relatives have personally clashed with the state authorities over its increasingly stringent policies on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's sibling embarked on a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the required reduction of his livestock, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara developed a four-year set of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge screen of numerous cranial remains, which was exhibited at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the entryway.

The Role of Art in Advocacy

Among the community, creative work is the only realm in which they can be heard by outsiders. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|