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Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have basked under an artificial sun, glided down amusement rides, and observed automated sea creatures hovering through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nasal passages of a reindeer. The newest artistic project for this immense space—created by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a labyrinthine construction based on the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Upon entering, they can meander around or relax on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to Sámi elders imparting stories and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It might seem quirky, but the artwork celebrates a obscure natural marvel: experts have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it takes in by eighty degrees, enabling the creature to thrive in harsh Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara notes, "generates a feeling of inferiority that you as a individual are not in control over nature." Sara is a former reporter, young adult author, and land defender, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that fosters the chance to change your viewpoint or spark some modesty," she adds.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The labyrinthine installation is part of a elements in Sara's immersive art project showcasing the culture, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They've experienced persecution, integration policies, and repression of their tongue by all four states. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the installation also highlights the group's issues connected to the global warming, property rights, and external control.

Symbolism in Materials

At the long entrance ramp, there's a towering, 26-meter structure of skins trapped by power and light cables. It serves as a metaphor for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this component of the installation, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an harsh environmental condition, whereby dense coatings of ice appear as varying conditions thaw and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary cold-season sustenance, fungus. Goavvi is a outcome of climate change, which is occurring up to four times faster in the Polar region than in other regions.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and went with Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they carried trailers of food pellets on to the exposed tundra to dispense through labor. The reindeer crowded round us, pawing the frozen ground in vain for mossy morsels. This expensive and laborious process is having a drastic influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. However the alternative is starvation. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are dying—a number from starvation, others drowning after sinking in streams through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the work is a memorial to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

The installation also emphasizes the clear difference between the western interpretation of electricity as a commodity to be utilized for gain and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an innate essence in creatures, people, and nature. Tate Modern's legacy as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by regional governments. As they strive to be exemplars for sustainable power, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, water power facilities, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi argue their legal protections, ways of life, and culture are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to stand your ground when the justifications are rooted in global sustainability," Sara observes. "Extractivism has co-opted the language of environmentalism, but still it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to persist in practices of use."

Individual Conflicts

The artist and her family have personally clashed with the Norwegian government over its tightening regulations on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's sibling embarked on a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the required reduction of his livestock, apparently to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a four-year set of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal curtain of numerous reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it is displayed in the entryway.

Art as Awareness

Among the community, art is the only sphere in which they can be heard by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|