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Attendees to the renowned gallery are familiar to unexpected encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've basked under an artificial sun, descended down amusement rides, and witnessed robotic jellyfish floating through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the complex nasal cavities of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this huge space—created by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a maze-like design inspired by the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nasal airways. Inside, they can stroll around or relax on pelts, listening on earphones to Sámi elders telling narratives and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It may sound playful, but the installation pays tribute to a little-known scientific wonder: researchers have found that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the surrounding air it breathes in by eighty degrees, enabling the creature to thrive in extreme Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "creates a sense of inferiority that you as a person are not dominant over nature." The artist is a former journalist, children's author, and environmental activist, who comes from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that fosters the possibility to shift your outlook or trigger some modesty," she states.

A Tribute to Indigenous Heritage

The labyrinthine installation is among various elements in Sara's engaging exhibition honoring the culture, science, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They've faced discrimination, cultural suppression, and suppression of their dialect by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the art also highlights the community's struggles connected to the climate crisis, land dispossession, and external control.

Meaning in Materials

Along the long entry incline, there's a towering, 26-metre sculpture of skins entangled by electrical wires. It can be read as a analogy for the societal frameworks restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this part of the artwork, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an severe climatic event, whereby solid coatings of ice form as changing temperatures liquefy and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' primary cold-season food, fungus. This phenomenon is a consequence of climate change, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Far North than globally.

Previously, I met with Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi herders on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they carried carts of supplementary feed on to the barren tundra to dispense through labor. These animals gathered round us, pawing the slippery ground in futility for vegetative pieces. This expensive and laborious method is having a significant impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the alternative is death. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are dying—a number from lack of food, others submerging after falling into water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the art is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm introducing the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

This artwork also highlights the clear divergence between the industrial understanding of energy as a asset to be utilized for gain and survival and the Sámi outlook of life force as an inherent essence in animals, individuals, and land. Tate Modern's past as a fossil fuel plant is connected to this, as is what the Sámi consider eco-imperialism by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be leaders for renewable energy, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the development of wind energy projects, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and traditions are at risk. "It's hard being such a limited population to protect your rights when the reasons are rooted in global sustainability," Sara comments. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but yet it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to continue practices of use."

Family Conflicts

Sara and her relatives have personally clashed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent rules on herding. Previously, Sara's brother undertook a series of unsuccessful legal cases over the forced culling of his herd, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara produced a four-year collection of creations called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge screen of numerous reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the the show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it hangs in the lobby.

The Role of Art in Awareness

For many Sámi, creative work is the exclusive realm in which they can be heard by outsiders. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|