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Guests to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an man-made sun, slid down spiral slides, and witnessed AI-powered jellyfish floating through the air. However this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nose chambers of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this huge space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a winding construction based on the expanded inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Once inside, they can stroll around or chill out on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to tribal seniors telling stories and wisdom.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It might sound whimsical, but the exhibit honors a little-known biological feat: scientists have discovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the ambient air it breathes in by eighty degrees, enabling the creature to endure in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "creates a sense of inferiority that you as a individual are not superior over nature." She is a ex- writer, children's author, and rights advocate, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Possibly that creates the chance to change your perspective or evoke some humbleness," she continues.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The maze-like design is part of a components in Sara's absorbing commission showcasing the traditions, science, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They have experienced oppression, cultural suppression, and eradication of their tongue by all four nations. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the work also highlights the community's challenges connected to the global warming, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Materials

Along the lengthy access ramp, there's a towering, eighty-five-foot sculpture of reindeer hides entangled by electrical wires. It serves as a symbol for the societal frameworks constraining the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this part of the artwork, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi name for an harsh environmental condition, wherein dense sheets of ice form as fluctuating temperatures melt and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary cold-season nourishment, fungus. The condition is a consequence of climate change, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Far North than globally.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in a remote town during a icy season and joined Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they transported containers of food pellets on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to distribute by hand. The herd gathered round us, scratching the slippery ground in vain for vegetative pieces. This costly and labour-intensive process is having a significant effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. However the other option is death. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are dying—some from starvation, others submerging after falling into lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the work is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

This artwork also highlights the sharp divergence between the western view of energy as a resource to be harnessed for profit and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an inherent power in animals, humans, and nature. The gallery's past as a fossil fuel plant is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by Nordic countries. While attempting to be standard bearers for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and culture are at risk. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to stand your ground when the arguments are grounded in global sustainability," Sara notes. "Extractivism has co-opted the discourse of sustainability, but yet it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to persist in practices of expenditure."

Family Conflicts

Sara and her kin have personally conflicted with the national administration over its increasingly stringent policies on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's sibling initiated a set of ultimately unsuccessful court actions over the forced culling of his herd, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara produced a four-year collection of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal curtain of numerous animal bones, which was shown at the the show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it resides in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Activism

For many Sámi, visual expression is the exclusive sphere in which they can be understood by outsiders. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|