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Visitors to the renowned gallery are familiar to unusual encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have basked under an simulated sun, glided down spiral slides, and seen automated sea creatures hovering through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nasal cavities of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this immense space—developed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a maze-like design modeled after the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nasal passages. Once inside, they can meander around or unwind on reindeer hides, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors imparting stories and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It could appear playful, but the exhibit celebrates a rarely recognized scientific wonder: researchers have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the surrounding air it takes in by eighty degrees, helping the animal to survive in extreme Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "creates a perception of smallness that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." Sara is a former journalist, children's author, and land defender, who is from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Maybe that creates the chance to change your perspective or trigger some humbleness," she states.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The maze-like design is among various features in Sara's engaging exhibition showcasing the traditions, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They have endured discrimination, forced assimilation, and eradication of their language by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the installation also highlights the people's challenges connected to the climate crisis, property rights, and external control.

Metaphor in Components

Along the extended access incline, there's a towering, 26-metre sculpture of pelts trapped by electrical wires. It can be read as a metaphor for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this section of the artwork, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an harsh environmental condition, whereby thick sheets of ice develop as changing conditions liquefy and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' key cold-season nourishment, lichen. Goavvi is a outcome of climate change, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Polar region than globally.

Previously, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they transported carts of food pellets on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to dispense through labor. The reindeer crowded round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain for vegetative pieces. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive method is having a severe impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. However the alternative is death. As these icy periods become frequent, reindeer are perishing—a number from lack of food, others submerging after sinking in streams through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the installation is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of elements, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

This artwork also highlights the sharp contrast between the western understanding of power as a asset to be exploited for profit and existence and the Sámi philosophy of life force as an innate life force in creatures, people, and land. Tate Modern's past as a fossil fuel plant is connected to this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be leaders for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, river barriers, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi contend their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and culture are endangered. "It's challenging being such a limited population to protect your rights when the arguments are based on global sustainability," Sara observes. "Extractivism has co-opted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but still it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to persist in habits of expenditure."

Individual Challenges

She and her family have personally clashed with the national administration over its tightening rules on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's sibling initiated a series of unsuccessful legal cases over the required reduction of his livestock, apparently to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara produced a multi-year collection of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal drape of 400 cranial remains, which was shown at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it hangs in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, visual expression is the sole sphere in which they can be heard by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|