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Visitors to Tate Modern are used to unusual displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an artificial sun, glided down spiral slides, and seen automated jellyfish drifting through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the complex nose cavities of a reindeer. The newest artistic project for this cavernous space—created by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a labyrinthine construction based on the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Inside, they can stroll around or chill out on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to community leaders sharing tales and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

Why choose the nasal structure? It might appear playful, but the exhibit celebrates a rarely recognized biological feat: scientists have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the surrounding air it takes in by 80°C, helping the creature to survive in extreme Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "creates a perception of inferiority that you as a person are not dominant over nature." She is a ex- journalist, writer for kids, and land defender, who hails from a herding family in northern Norway. "Possibly that fosters the potential to change your perspective or spark some modesty," she states.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The maze-like structure is among various elements in Sara's engaging exhibition celebrating the culture, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total about 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They have faced discrimination, cultural suppression, and repression of their dialect by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the installation also highlights the people's struggles relating to the global warming, property rights, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Components

At the lengthy access slope, there's a soaring, 26-metre structure of reindeer hides ensnared by electrical wires. It represents a analogy for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Part pylon, part spiritual ascent, this component of the exhibit, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an severe climatic event, wherein solid layers of ice appear as changing temperatures liquefy and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' main cold-season nourishment, fungus. The condition is a consequence of global heating, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than globally.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a icy season and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they carried containers of animal nutrition on to the exposed Arctic plains to provide by hand. The reindeer surrounded round us, scratching the slippery ground in vain for lichen-covered pieces. This expensive and laborious method is having a drastic influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. Yet the other option is starvation. As these icy periods become routine, reindeer are perishing—a number from starvation, others drowning after plunging into streams through prematurely melting ice. To some extent, the art is a monument to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Perspectives

This artwork also highlights the sharp contrast between the western interpretation of power as a commodity to be utilized for gain and survival and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an innate power in creatures, individuals, and the environment. This venue's past as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be leaders for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of windfarms, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their legal protections, ways of life, and way of life are at risk. "It's hard being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the justifications are rooted in environmental protection," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the rhetoric of ecology, but yet it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to persist in practices of use."

Individual Struggles

The artist and her relatives have personally clashed with the state authorities over its increasingly stringent regulations on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's brother embarked on a sequence of unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara developed a multi-year set of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive curtain of numerous animal bones, which was exhibited at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it is displayed in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work appears the sole sphere in which they can be understood by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|