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Guests to the renowned gallery are accustomed to unexpected experiences in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an man-made sun, slid down helter skelters, and observed robotic sea creatures floating through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nasal chambers of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a maze-like construction inspired by the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Inside, they can wander around or unwind on pelts, tuning in on earphones to community leaders telling stories and insights.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It may appear playful, but the installation honors a little-known scientific wonder: experts have found that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it takes in by 80°C, helping the creature to endure in extreme Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "produces a perception of insignificance that you as a individual are not superior over nature." Sara is a former journalist, young adult author, and land defender, who is from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that generates the potential to alter your outlook or trigger some humility," she states.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The winding installation is part of a components in Sara's immersive exhibition celebrating the traditions, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They've faced discrimination, forced assimilation, and eradication of their tongue by all four states. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the work also spotlights the people's issues relating to the climate crisis, land dispossession, and external control.

Meaning in Materials

At the long entrance incline, there's a looming, 26-metre formation of reindeer hides trapped by power and light cables. It serves as a analogy for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this component of the installation, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, wherein thick layers of ice form as fluctuating weather melt and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' key winter food, moss. Goavvi is a consequence of planetary warming, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than in other regions.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and joined Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they hauled trailers of animal nutrition on to the barren Arctic plains to dispense by hand. These animals crowded round us, pawing the frozen ground in futility for vegetative bits. This resource-intensive and demanding process is having a drastic influence on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the other option is starvation. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—some from lack of food, others drowning after sinking in lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the art is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm introducing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Perspectives

This artwork also underscores the clear difference between the modern understanding of power as a resource to be utilized for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of life force as an natural essence in creatures, people, and the environment. Tate Modern's legacy as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by regional governments. While attempting to be exemplars for sustainable power, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their traditional territory; the Sámi contend their legal protections, livelihoods, and way of life are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to defend yourself when the arguments are grounded in environmental protection," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the rhetoric of sustainability, but still it's just attempting to find better ways to persist in habits of expenditure."

Family Challenges

She and her relatives have personally disagreed with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter regulations on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's brother embarked on a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the required reduction of his animals, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara produced a extended collection of creations called Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal curtain of numerous cranial remains, which was shown at the 2017 event Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it hangs in the entryway.

Art as Activism

For many Sámi, creative work seems the sole sphere in which they can be heard by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|