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Visitors to the renowned gallery are used to surprising displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an simulated sun, glided down spiral slides, and observed robotic jellyfish hovering through the air. Yet this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nasal chambers of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this immense space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a winding design based on the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose cavities. Upon entering, they can wander around or relax on skins, listening on earphones to tribal seniors imparting stories and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

Why choose the nasal structure? It might sound playful, but the artwork celebrates a rarely recognized biological feat: scientists have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it takes in by eighty degrees, enabling the animal to thrive in extreme Arctic climates. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "creates a sense of insignificance that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." Sara is a ex- writer, children's author, and rights advocate, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that generates the potential to alter your perspective or spark some humbleness," she continues.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The maze-like installation is among various features in Sara's engaging exhibition honoring the heritage, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total about 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They've experienced discrimination, forced assimilation, and repression of their language by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the installation also draws attention to the group's issues relating to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and external control.

Symbolism in Components

At the lengthy entrance incline, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot sculpture of reindeer hides ensnared by utility lines. It can be read as a metaphor for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this part of the installation, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein solid layers of ice form as varying temperatures liquefy and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' main winter food, fungus. The condition is a consequence of climate change, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than elsewhere.

Previously, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a icy season and went with Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they transported carts of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to distribute by hand. These animals gathered round us, scratching the icy ground in vain for vegetative pieces. This costly and labour-intensive procedure is having a severe impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the alternative is starvation. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—a number from starvation, others submerging after falling into lakes and rivers through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the installation is a monument to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

The installation also emphasizes the stark difference between the industrial interpretation of power as a asset to be exploited for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an innate life force in animals, humans, and nature. Tate Modern's past as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be leaders for clean sources, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the development of wind energy projects, river barriers, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their legal protections, incomes, and culture are endangered. "It's hard being such a limited population to protect your rights when the reasons are rooted in environmental protection," Sara observes. "Mining practices has adopted the rhetoric of ecology, but yet it's just attempting to find alternative ways to continue patterns of use."

Individual Struggles

She and her kin have personally clashed with the national administration over its tightening rules on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's sibling undertook a series of unsuccessful legal cases over the required reduction of his livestock, supposedly to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara created a multi-year set of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive screen of four hundred cranial remains, which was shown at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it is displayed in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, visual expression is the only sphere in which they can be listened to by the global community. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|