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Attendees to Tate Modern are used to unusual encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an simulated sun, descended down spiral slides, and seen automated jellyfish drifting through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nasal passages of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this immense space—developed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a maze-like construction inspired by the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nasal airways. Upon entering, they can stroll around or chill out on pelts, listening on headphones to community leaders imparting narratives and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It may sound quirky, but the artwork celebrates a little-known biological feat: researchers have found that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it takes in by eighty degrees, allowing the animal to survive in extreme Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "produces a feeling of smallness that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." Sara is a former reporter, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who comes from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Maybe that generates the chance to alter your viewpoint or spark some humility," she adds.

An Homage to Indigenous Heritage

The winding installation is part of a components in Sara's immersive commission celebrating the heritage, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi number about 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They have faced oppression, cultural suppression, and repression of their dialect by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi belief system and founding narrative, the installation also spotlights the group's issues relating to the global warming, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Elements

At the extended entry incline, there's a soaring, 26-metre sculpture of reindeer hides entangled by power and light cables. It can be read as a metaphor for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Part pylon, part spiritual ascent, this component of the artwork, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein dense coatings of ice form as changing conditions melt and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary winter nourishment, fungus. The condition is a consequence of planetary warming, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than in other regions.

Three years ago, I met with Sara in a remote town during a icy season and joined Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they hauled containers of animal nutrition on to the exposed tundra to provide manually. The reindeer surrounded round us, scratching the icy ground in futility for lichen-covered morsels. This costly and labour-intensive process is having a significant effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. But the alternative is death. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—a number from lack of food, others drowning after falling into water bodies through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the art is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

The installation also underscores the stark difference between the modern view of energy as a commodity to be exploited for profit and existence and the Sámi worldview of energy as an inherent life force in creatures, individuals, and nature. The gallery's history as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by Nordic countries. While attempting to be leaders for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have clashed with the Sámi over the construction of windfarms, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their traditional territory; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and traditions are threatened. "It's very difficult being such a tiny group to stand your ground when the justifications are grounded in global sustainability," Sara observes. "Mining practices has co-opted the discourse of sustainability, but still it's just attempting to find better ways to persist in practices of use."

Personal Conflicts

She and her kin have personally clashed with the state authorities over its ever-stricter regulations on herding. A few years ago, Sara's sibling embarked on a set of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, supposedly to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara created a four-year set of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi including a massive curtain of numerous cranial remains, which was displayed at the 2017 event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it hangs in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Awareness

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