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Attendees to Tate Modern are familiar to unexpected experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an artificial sun, descended down spiral slides, and observed automated jellyfish drifting through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nasal passages of a reindeer. The newest artistic project for this immense space—created by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a winding construction based on the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose cavities. Once inside, they can wander around or chill out on skins, listening on earphones to tribal seniors telling narratives and wisdom.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It might sound playful, but the exhibit honors a little-known natural marvel: scientists have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it takes in by 80°C, allowing the animal to endure in extreme Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara explains, "produces a perception of insignificance that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." She is a former writer, writer for kids, and environmental activist, who is from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Possibly that generates the chance to shift your outlook or trigger some humbleness," she continues.

A Celebration to Indigenous Heritage

The labyrinthine structure is one of several components in Sara's immersive exhibition celebrating the culture, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They've faced oppression, cultural suppression, and repression of their dialect by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi belief system and founding narrative, the installation also highlights the community's challenges connected to the global warming, property rights, and external control.

Symbolism in Materials

At the long entrance slope, there's a looming, 26-meter sculpture of skins entangled by electrical wires. It represents a metaphor for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this part of the artwork, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, wherein solid coatings of ice form as varying weather melt and ice over the snow, locking in the reindeers' key winter sustenance, fungus. Goavvi is a result of planetary warming, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Polar region than elsewhere.

Previously, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a icy season and joined Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they carried containers of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to provide by hand. These animals surrounded round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain for mossy bits. This resource-intensive and demanding procedure is having a severe influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. But the choice is starvation. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are succumbing—some from starvation, others submerging after plunging into streams through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the installation is a memorial to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

The sculpture also highlights the clear difference between the modern view of power as a asset to be exploited for profit and survival and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an innate life force in animals, humans, and the environment. The gallery's history as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be leaders for sustainable power, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the building of windfarms, water power facilities, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their legal protections, ways of life, and traditions are at risk. "It's hard being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the justifications are rooted in global sustainability," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the discourse of ecology, but still it's just striving to find more suitable ways to continue habits of use."

Personal Challenges

The artist and her family have personally clashed with the state authorities over its tightening regulations on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's brother initiated a series of finally failed court actions over the forced culling of his animals, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara created a four-year collection of creations named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge screen of four hundred cranial remains, which was exhibited at the the event Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the entrance.

Art as Awareness

Among the community, visual expression appears the sole domain in which they can be listened to by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|