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Visitors to Tate Modern are used to surprising displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an man-made sun, descended down amusement rides, and witnessed automated sea creatures drifting through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nose passages of a reindeer. The newest artistic project for this huge space—created by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a maze-like design based on the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nasal airways. Once inside, they can wander around or relax on pelts, tuning in on earphones to Sámi elders imparting tales and insights.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It may sound whimsical, but the artwork honors a obscure biological feat: researchers have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the ambient air it takes in by eighty degrees, helping the creature to thrive in extreme Arctic climates. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara explains, "generates a perception of inferiority that you as a individual are not in control over nature." Sara is a former writer, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who comes from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that fosters the chance to shift your outlook or spark some modesty," she continues.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The winding installation is part of a features in Sara's absorbing commission celebrating the heritage, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They have endured persecution, integration policies, and suppression of their tongue by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the art also highlights the group's struggles relating to the global warming, land dispossession, and external control.

Meaning in Materials

On the lengthy entrance incline, there's a looming, 26-metre formation of skins ensnared by power and light cables. It represents a analogy for the societal frameworks constraining the Sámi. Part pylon, part spiritual ascent, this component of the artwork, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, wherein dense layers of ice form as varying weather thaw and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' main cold-season food, lichen. The condition is a outcome of climate change, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Far North than globally.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in the Norwegian far north during a icy season and joined Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they transported containers of supplementary feed on to the exposed Arctic plains to dispense by hand. The herd crowded round us, scratching the icy ground in vain attempts for vegetative pieces. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive method is having a severe influence on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. However the alternative is starvation. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are succumbing—some from lack of food, others drowning after sinking in water bodies through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the art is a memorial to them. "With the layering of materials, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Perspectives

The sculpture also highlights the sharp contrast between the modern understanding of electricity as a commodity to be exploited for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of life force as an innate power in creatures, people, and land. This venue's past as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider eco-imperialism by regional governments. In their efforts to be leaders for renewable energy, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the building of windfarms, river barriers, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and traditions are endangered. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to protect your rights when the arguments are rooted in global sustainability," Sara comments. "Extractivism has appropriated the discourse of ecology, but yet it's just striving to find better ways to persist in habits of expenditure."

Individual Conflicts

Sara and her family have personally disagreed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent regulations on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's brother embarked on a series of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara developed a extended set of creations named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a colossal drape of numerous reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the the show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it hangs in the entryway.

The Role of Art in Awareness

For many Sámi, visual expression seems the sole realm in which they can be heard by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|