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Guests to the renowned gallery are used to surprising experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an simulated sun, glided down helter skelters, and observed AI-powered sea creatures floating through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the complex nose passages of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a maze-like structure based on the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nasal airways. Upon entering, they can wander around or relax on reindeer hides, tuning in on earphones to tribal seniors telling stories and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why choose the nasal structure? It may seem playful, but the installation honors a obscure scientific wonder: experts have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it breathes in by 80 degrees celsius, helping the creature to thrive in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "produces a feeling of smallness that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." She is a former writer, young adult author, and rights advocate, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Maybe that generates the potential to change your viewpoint or evoke some humility," she continues.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The winding structure is among various features in Sara's absorbing art project honoring the traditions, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total about 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They've endured discrimination, integration policies, and suppression of their language by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the installation also spotlights the community's challenges associated with the global warming, loss of territory, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Materials

On the lengthy access ramp, there's a looming, 26-metre formation of reindeer hides trapped by utility lines. It serves as a symbol for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this section of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, wherein thick sheets of ice develop as fluctuating conditions melt and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' main winter nourishment, lichen. This phenomenon is a outcome of planetary warming, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Polar region than globally.

A few years back, I met with Sara in a remote town during a icy season and joined Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they carried containers of animal nutrition on to the barren frozen landscape to provide through labor. These animals crowded round us, scratching the frozen ground in vain attempts for mossy bits. This costly and labour-intensive procedure is having a severe effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the choice is starvation. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are dying—a number from lack of food, others drowning after sinking in streams through unstable frozen surfaces. In a sense, the art is a memorial to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Perspectives

This artwork also emphasizes the sharp contrast between the industrial view of energy as a resource to be harnessed for gain and existence and the Sámi outlook of energy as an innate life force in creatures, individuals, and land. Tate Modern's past as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider eco-imperialism by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be exemplars for renewable energy, Nordic nations have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, hydroelectric dams, and mines on their traditional territory; the Sámi contend their legal protections, incomes, and culture are threatened. "It's hard being such a limited population to defend yourself when the arguments are based on global sustainability," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the language of environmentalism, but still it's just attempting to find better ways to continue patterns of expenditure."

Individual Conflicts

The artist and her family have personally disagreed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent rules on animal husbandry. Previously, Sara's sibling initiated a sequence of unsuccessful legal cases over the forced culling of his livestock, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara developed a multi-year series of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal curtain of 400 animal bones, which was shown at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it is displayed in the lobby.

The Role of Art in Advocacy

For numerous Indigenous people, visual expression is the exclusive domain in which they can be understood by the global community. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|