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Visitors to Tate Modern are accustomed to surprising encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an simulated sun, slid down amusement rides, and seen automated jellyfish drifting through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nasal chambers of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this huge space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a winding construction based on the expanded interior of a reindeer's nasal passages. Once inside, they can meander around or unwind on pelts, tuning in on headphones to Sámi elders imparting narratives and insights.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why the nose? It may sound quirky, but the artwork celebrates a obscure biological feat: researchers have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it inhales by eighty degrees, helping the creature to survive in extreme Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "produces a perception of smallness that you as a human being are not in control over nature." Sara is a ex- journalist, young adult author, and rights advocate, who is from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Maybe that fosters the chance to alter your perspective or trigger some modesty," she continues.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The winding design is part of a features in Sara's absorbing art project celebrating the heritage, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count about 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They have endured discrimination, cultural suppression, and repression of their tongue by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the work also spotlights the people's challenges relating to the global warming, loss of territory, and external control.

Symbolism in Materials

Along the extended access slope, there's a soaring, 26-meter structure of skins trapped by electrical wires. It serves as a analogy for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this component of the artwork, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which thick layers of ice appear as changing temperatures melt and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' main cold-season food, moss. The condition is a outcome of planetary warming, which is happening up to four times faster in the Arctic than globally.

A few years back, I met with Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and went with Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they transported containers of food pellets on to the barren Arctic plains to provide manually. The herd gathered round us, digging the frozen ground in vain for vegetative pieces. This expensive and labour-intensive procedure is having a significant influence on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. However the choice is death. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are dying—a number from starvation, others suffocating after falling into streams through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the installation is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

The sculpture also underscores the stark divergence between the modern view of electricity as a resource to be utilized for profit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of energy as an natural power in animals, people, and the environment. This venue's legacy as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by regional governments. While attempting to be exemplars for clean sources, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, water power facilities, and mines on their traditional territory; the Sámi contend their human rights, ways of life, and culture are endangered. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the justifications are rooted in saving the world," Sara notes. "Mining practices has co-opted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just striving to find more suitable ways to persist in practices of expenditure."

Family Challenges

The artist and her family have themselves clashed with the Norwegian government over its tightening regulations on herding. In 2016, Sara's sibling undertook a sequence of finally failed lawsuits over the forced culling of his animals, supposedly to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara produced a extended set of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive screen of 400 animal bones, which was displayed at the 2017 event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it resides in the lobby.

The Role of Art in Advocacy

For many Sámi, creative work seems the sole sphere in which they can be understood by outsiders. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|