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Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to surprising experiences in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an artificial sun, slid down spiral slides, and witnessed AI-powered jellyfish drifting through the air. But this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nasal chambers of a reindeer. The current artist commission for this immense space—developed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes patrons into a labyrinthine structure based on the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Inside, they can wander around or chill out on pelts, listening on headphones to community leaders telling stories and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It may appear whimsical, but the artwork pays tribute to a rarely recognized scientific wonder: researchers have found that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the creature to thrive in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "generates a sense of inferiority that you as a human being are not in control over nature." Sara is a former journalist, young adult author, and environmental activist, who comes from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that generates the potential to alter your perspective or evoke some humbleness," she states.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The winding design is among various elements in Sara's engaging art project honoring 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, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They've endured oppression, cultural suppression, and eradication of their dialect by all four states. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the work also highlights the community's struggles connected to the global warming, property rights, and external control.

Metaphor in Materials

On the lengthy entrance ramp, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot sculpture of pelts ensnared by electrical wires. It represents a metaphor for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this part of the artwork, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an severe climatic event, whereby dense layers of ice develop as fluctuating weather thaw and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' key winter food, lichen. Goavvi is a result of planetary warming, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Polar region than elsewhere.

Previously, I visited Sara in a remote town during a icy season and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they carried containers of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to dispense manually. The herd surrounded round us, pawing the frozen ground in futility for vegetative pieces. This resource-intensive and laborious procedure is having a drastic impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. However the choice is starvation. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are perishing—a number from starvation, others submerging after plunging into streams through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the work is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of elements, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

The sculpture also emphasizes the sharp contrast between the modern view of energy as a commodity to be harnessed for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an inherent life force in animals, humans, and land. This venue's legacy as a fossil fuel plant is connected to this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by Nordic countries. While attempting to be standard bearers for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of wind energy projects, water power facilities, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and culture are at risk. "It's hard being such a limited population to protect your rights when the reasons are based on global sustainability," Sara comments. "Extractivism has co-opted the discourse of sustainability, but yet it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to maintain habits of use."

Family Struggles

Sara and her relatives have personally disagreed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent rules on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's brother initiated a series of finally failed legal cases over the forced culling of his animals, apparently to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara created a extended series of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal drape of numerous reindeer skulls, which was shown at the the event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the public gallery, where it resides in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Activism

Among the community, art seems the exclusive domain in which they can be heard by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|