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Attendees to the renowned gallery are familiar to unusual encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an artificial sun, glided down spiral slides, and seen robotic sea creatures hovering through the air. But this marks the first time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nose passages of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this huge space—created by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a winding construction inspired by the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nose passages. Once inside, they can meander around or chill out on skins, listening on earphones to Sámi elders sharing tales and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It could appear quirky, but the exhibit pays tribute to a obscure natural marvel: experts have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it inhales by 80 degrees celsius, allowing the animal to thrive in harsh Arctic conditions. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "produces a perception of inferiority that you as a person are not dominant over nature." The artist is a former journalist, writer for kids, and land defender, who is from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that generates the potential to shift your outlook or spark some humbleness," she adds.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The labyrinthine design is one of several elements in Sara's immersive exhibition celebrating the culture, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They have faced discrimination, forced assimilation, and suppression of their language by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the work also spotlights the community's challenges relating to the environmental emergency, property rights, and colonialism.

Meaning in Components

Along the lengthy entry incline, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot sculpture of pelts trapped by utility lines. It represents a analogy for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this component of the artwork, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, in which dense coatings of ice form as varying weather thaw and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary cold-season nourishment, moss. The condition is a result of planetary warming, which is taking place up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than globally.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and went with Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in freezing temperatures as they transported trailers of supplementary feed on to the barren tundra to distribute manually. The herd surrounded round us, pawing the icy ground in vain attempts for lichen-covered morsels. This costly and demanding process is having a significant effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. But the alternative is death. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—some from starvation, others drowning after plunging into water bodies through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the work is a monument to them. "With the layering of elements, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

This artwork also underscores the clear divergence between the modern understanding of energy as a resource to be exploited for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an natural life force in animals, individuals, and nature. Tate Modern's past as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider eco-imperialism by Nordic countries. In their efforts to be leaders for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, water power facilities, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their human rights, incomes, and culture are threatened. "It's challenging being such a small minority to protect your rights when the reasons are grounded in environmental protection," Sara comments. "Mining practices has co-opted the language of sustainability, but nonetheless it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to persist in patterns of expenditure."

Personal Struggles

The artist and her kin have personally disagreed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent rules on herding. A few years ago, Sara's brother embarked on a sequence of unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, supposedly to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a multi-year series of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive drape of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was shown at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the public gallery, where it is displayed in the lobby.

The Role of Art in Activism

Among the community, art seems the sole domain in which they can be heard by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|