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Guests to Tate Modern are familiar to unexpected displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an artificial sun, slid down spiral slides, and observed automated jellyfish drifting through the air. Yet this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nose cavities of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this immense space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a maze-like design inspired by the expanded inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Once inside, they can meander around or relax on skins, tuning in on earphones to community leaders telling stories and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It may appear playful, but the artwork celebrates a rarely recognized natural marvel: scientists have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the ambient air it breathes in by 80 degrees celsius, helping the creature to survive in harsh Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "generates a feeling of inferiority that you as a person are not dominant over nature." She is a ex- writer, children's author, and rights advocate, who is from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Maybe that creates the possibility to change your perspective or spark some humility," she adds.

A Celebration to Indigenous Heritage

The labyrinthine design is part of a components in Sara's immersive commission showcasing the culture, science, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number about 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They've faced persecution, cultural suppression, and repression of their dialect by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the installation also draws attention to the community's issues connected to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Components

At the extended entry slope, there's a towering, eighty-five-foot formation of reindeer hides entangled by utility lines. It serves as a symbol for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part heavenly staircase, this component of the artwork, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein thick sheets of ice form as varying weather melt and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' key winter nourishment, lichen. The condition is a result of climate change, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I met with Sara in a remote town during a icy season and joined Sámi herders on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they carried trailers of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured tundra to distribute by hand. These animals crowded round us, scratching the icy ground in vain attempts for vegetative bits. This resource-intensive and laborious process is having a severe influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the alternative is death. As these icy periods become frequent, reindeer are perishing—some from starvation, others suffocating after sinking in water bodies through prematurely melting ice. To some extent, the installation is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm introducing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

The installation also highlights the clear difference between the modern interpretation of electricity as a commodity to be exploited for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi outlook of energy as an natural essence in animals, people, and nature. The gallery's past as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi consider environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be leaders for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their legal protections, ways of life, and traditions are threatened. "It's hard being such a small minority to stand your ground when the reasons are rooted in global sustainability," Sara comments. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the rhetoric of ecology, but still it's just striving to find better ways to continue patterns of consumption."

Individual Struggles

She and her family have personally disagreed with the state authorities over its ever-stricter regulations on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's sibling initiated a series of unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara developed a extended series of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive curtain of 400 cranial remains, which was exhibited at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it resides in the entryway.

The Role of Art in Advocacy

For numerous Indigenous people, visual expression is the exclusive realm in which they can be heard by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|