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Guests to Tate Modern are accustomed to unusual displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've basked under an simulated sun, slid down amusement rides, and observed AI-powered jellyfish hovering through the air. Yet this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nose cavities of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this immense space—designed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages patrons into a winding design modeled after the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nose cavities. Upon entering, they can meander around or relax on reindeer hides, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors imparting tales and insights.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It might sound quirky, but the exhibit pays tribute to a rarely recognized biological feat: experts have found that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the ambient air it breathes in by 80 degrees celsius, helping the creature to thrive in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara explains, "produces a perception of smallness that you as a person are not dominant over nature." The artist is a ex- journalist, children's author, and land defender, who hails from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that fosters the possibility to change your viewpoint or trigger some modesty," she continues.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The maze-like installation is among various features in Sara's engaging commission showcasing the culture, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number about 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They have faced oppression, integration policies, and repression of their dialect by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the art also spotlights the community's challenges associated with the global warming, loss of territory, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Components

At the lengthy entrance ramp, there's a soaring, 26-meter formation of skins ensnared by electrical wires. It can be read as a symbol for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this part of the exhibit, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein solid sheets of ice form as fluctuating conditions liquefy and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' main winter sustenance, fungus. This phenomenon is a outcome of planetary warming, which is happening up to four times faster in the Polar region than globally.

Previously, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and went with Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they carried trailers of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured tundra to dispense through labor. The reindeer surrounded round us, pawing the icy ground in futility for lichen-covered morsels. This expensive and demanding method is having a severe influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. Yet the alternative is malnutrition. As goavvi winters become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—a number from hunger, others submerging after falling into water bodies through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the art is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm introducing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

The installation also emphasizes the clear divergence between the modern view of power as a commodity to be utilized for gain and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of life force as an inherent essence in creatures, humans, and the environment. This venue's legacy as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider eco-imperialism by regional governments. In their efforts to be standard bearers for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have clashed with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, water power facilities, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi assert their legal protections, incomes, and traditions are threatened. "It's hard being such a tiny group to protect your rights when the justifications are rooted in saving the world," Sara comments. "Extractivism has co-opted the language of environmentalism, but still it's just striving to find alternative ways to persist in practices of use."

Individual Challenges

Sara and her family have themselves conflicted with the Norwegian government over its tightening rules on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's sibling undertook a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the required reduction of his animals, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a four-year series of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a colossal drape of numerous animal bones, which was displayed at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it hangs in the entrance.

The Role of Art in Awareness

For many Sámi, visual expression seems the exclusive domain in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|