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Visitors to Tate Modern are familiar to unusual encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an simulated sun, descended down helter skelters, and witnessed automated jellyfish floating through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nose passages of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this cavernous space—developed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes patrons into a winding design inspired by the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nasal airways. Inside, they can meander around or unwind on pelts, tuning in on earphones to community leaders telling tales and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It could sound whimsical, but the installation honors a little-known scientific wonder: researchers have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the ambient air it takes in by 80°C, helping the animal to survive in harsh Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "produces a perception of insignificance that you as a person are not superior over nature." She is a ex- journalist, young adult author, and land defender, who is from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Possibly that fosters the potential to alter your outlook or spark some humbleness," she continues.

A Tribute to Traditional Ways

The winding design is among various features in Sara's engaging commission showcasing the traditions, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number about 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They have faced discrimination, integration policies, and suppression of their language by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the installation also spotlights the group's issues relating to the global warming, property rights, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Elements

Along the extended access incline, there's a soaring, 26-meter structure of reindeer hides trapped by power and light cables. It can be read as a metaphor for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this section of the artwork, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, whereby thick layers of ice develop as fluctuating conditions liquefy and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' primary cold-season nourishment, fungus. This phenomenon is a outcome of planetary warming, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than in other regions.

Previously, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they carried carts of animal nutrition on to the barren Arctic plains to dispense through labor. The herd surrounded round us, pawing the frozen ground in vain attempts for lichen-covered morsels. This expensive and labour-intensive method is having a severe influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the other option is starvation. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—some from hunger, others submerging after plunging into water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the art is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

The installation also emphasizes the clear difference between the industrial interpretation of electricity as a commodity to be exploited for profit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of life force as an natural power in animals, humans, and land. Tate Modern's history as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi consider environmental exploitation by regional governments. In their efforts to be standard bearers for sustainable power, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, river barriers, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi contend their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and way of life are endangered. "It's challenging being such a small minority to protect your rights when the reasons are based on global sustainability," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the language of sustainability, but still it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to continue practices of use."

Individual Conflicts

She and her kin have themselves clashed with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter rules on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's sibling initiated a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, supposedly to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a multi-year collection of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi featuring a colossal screen of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the the event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it is displayed in the entryway.

The Role of Art in Advocacy

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