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Attendees to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They've basked under an simulated sun, descended down spiral slides, and witnessed automated jellyfish floating through the air. Yet this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nose cavities of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this huge space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a maze-like structure based on the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Inside, they can meander around or chill out on skins, tuning in on headphones to community leaders sharing tales and wisdom.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It may appear whimsical, but the artwork celebrates a little-known scientific wonder: experts have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it takes in by eighty degrees, allowing the animal to survive in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara explains, "produces a perception of smallness that you as a person are not dominant over nature." Sara is a former writer, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who is from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that fosters the chance to shift your outlook or trigger some modesty," she adds.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The maze-like structure is part of a components in Sara's absorbing art project celebrating the heritage, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi number about 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They've faced discrimination, integration policies, and suppression of their dialect by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the work also draws attention to the group's issues associated with the global warming, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Meaning in Materials

At the lengthy entrance incline, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot structure of skins entangled by electrical wires. It can be read as a symbol for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this component of the artwork, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an harsh environmental condition, wherein solid sheets of ice develop as varying temperatures melt and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' main cold-season food, fungus. Goavvi is a result of global heating, which is happening up to four times faster in the Arctic than globally.

Previously, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a icy season and joined Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they carried trailers of food pellets on to the exposed frozen landscape to provide manually. These animals crowded round us, scratching the slippery ground in vain attempts for lichen-covered bits. This costly and laborious procedure is having a drastic effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. But the alternative is death. As these icy periods become routine, reindeer are perishing—some from starvation, others submerging after sinking in streams through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the work is a tribute to them. "With the layering of materials, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Perspectives

The sculpture also emphasizes the clear divergence between the modern view of electricity as a resource to be harnessed for gain and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of life force as an innate life force in creatures, people, and nature. This venue's history as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by Nordic countries. As they strive to be exemplars for sustainable power, Nordic nations have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of windfarms, river barriers, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi contend their human rights, ways of life, and way of life are endangered. "It's challenging being such a limited population to defend yourself when the justifications are grounded in environmental protection," Sara comments. "Extractivism has co-opted the language of sustainability, but yet it's just attempting to find better ways to continue patterns of use."

Personal Challenges

Sara and her kin have personally conflicted with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent regulations on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's brother initiated a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the required reduction of his herd, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara created a multi-year set of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a colossal screen of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the 2017's art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it is displayed in the entrance.

Art as Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, art is the sole domain in which they can be heard by the global community. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|