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Guests to the renowned gallery are used to unusual encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have basked under an artificial sun, glided down amusement rides, and seen AI-powered sea creatures hovering through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this huge space—designed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a winding design based on the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Once inside, they can stroll around or relax on skins, listening on headphones to Sámi elders sharing stories and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It might seem whimsical, but the artwork celebrates a rarely recognized natural marvel: scientists have discovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the ambient air it breathes in by eighty degrees, allowing the animal to thrive in harsh Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "creates a perception of insignificance that you as a person are not superior over nature." Sara is a former journalist, young adult author, and land defender, who is from a pastoral family in northern Norway. "Maybe that fosters the potential to shift your perspective or spark some modesty," she continues.

A Tribute to Traditional Ways

The winding design is part of a components in Sara's engaging commission showcasing the heritage, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They have faced discrimination, integration policies, and repression of their tongue by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi mythology and origin tale, the art also draws attention to the group's issues associated with the global warming, property rights, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Components

On the lengthy access ramp, there's a towering, 26-metre structure of reindeer hides entangled by electrical wires. It can be read as a symbol for the political and economic systems restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part heavenly staircase, this component of the installation, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which solid layers of ice develop as fluctuating temperatures melt and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' key winter sustenance, fungus. The condition is a result of planetary warming, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Polar region than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in freezing temperatures as they carried carts of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured tundra to dispense by hand. The herd gathered round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain for mossy morsels. This resource-intensive and laborious procedure is having a significant impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. Yet the alternative is starvation. As these icy periods become frequent, reindeer are perishing—a number from hunger, others suffocating after sinking in lakes and rivers through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the installation is a monument to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm introducing the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

The installation also emphasizes the sharp contrast between the modern view of power as a resource to be exploited for gain and survival and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an inherent essence in creatures, people, and land. Tate Modern's legacy as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi consider eco-imperialism by Nordic countries. As they strive to be standard bearers for sustainable power, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, water power facilities, and mines on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their human rights, livelihoods, and traditions are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the justifications are based on saving the world," Sara notes. "Mining practices has appropriated the rhetoric of environmentalism, but still it's just attempting to find better ways to continue practices of use."

Family Challenges

She and her relatives have themselves disagreed with the national administration over its ever-stricter regulations on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's sibling embarked on a sequence of unsuccessful court actions over the forced culling of his animals, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara created a four-year series of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi including a massive drape of four hundred animal bones, which was displayed at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the national institution, where it is displayed in the entrance.

The Role of Art in Awareness

Among the community, visual expression is the exclusive realm in which they can be heard by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|