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Guests to Tate Modern are familiar to unexpected encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an artificial sun, glided down spiral slides, and witnessed AI-powered jellyfish floating through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this huge space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a winding construction based on the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nose cavities. Once inside, they can meander around or unwind on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to Sámi elders telling narratives and insights.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It may sound quirky, but the artwork honors a little-known biological feat: scientists have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it takes in by eighty degrees, enabling the creature to survive in inhospitable Arctic climates. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "creates a feeling of inferiority that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." Sara is a ex- reporter, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who is from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that fosters the possibility to change your perspective or trigger some humility," she states.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The winding structure is among various features in Sara's immersive exhibition honoring the culture, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi count about 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They've faced discrimination, cultural suppression, and suppression of their language by all four nations. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the art also spotlights the people's struggles relating to the global warming, property rights, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Elements

Along the lengthy entry incline, there's a looming, 26-metre sculpture of pelts trapped by power and light cables. It represents a metaphor for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this component of the artwork, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, in which solid layers of ice appear as varying conditions thaw and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary winter food, fungus. Goavvi is a outcome of planetary warming, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than elsewhere.

A few years back, I met with Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and went with Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they hauled carts of supplementary feed on to the barren frozen landscape to dispense by hand. The reindeer surrounded round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain for mossy pieces. This expensive and demanding method is having a severe impact on herding practices—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the choice is malnutrition. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are succumbing—a number from starvation, others suffocating after plunging into streams through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the installation is a monument to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

This artwork also highlights the sharp difference between the industrial interpretation of electricity as a asset to be utilized for profit and survival and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an inherent life force in animals, individuals, and land. This venue's legacy as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by regional governments. In their efforts to be leaders for renewable energy, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, river barriers, and mines on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and way of life are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to protect your rights when the reasons are based on environmental protection," Sara notes. "Extractivism has appropriated the discourse of environmentalism, but yet it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to continue practices of expenditure."

Family Conflicts

She and her relatives have personally disagreed with the Norwegian government over its tightening policies on animal husbandry. Previously, Sara's sibling initiated a set of unsuccessful court actions over the forced culling of his livestock, supposedly to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara produced a extended collection of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge curtain of four hundred cranial remains, which was exhibited at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it is displayed in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

For numerous Indigenous people, art is the exclusive realm in which they can be understood by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|