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Attendees to the renowned gallery are used to unexpected displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an simulated sun, glided down spiral slides, and witnessed automated sea creatures hovering through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nasal passages of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this cavernous space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a maze-like design modeled after the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Inside, they can stroll around or chill out on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to community leaders telling narratives and insights.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It may sound playful, but the installation honors a obscure scientific wonder: researchers have discovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it takes in by eighty degrees, allowing the animal to thrive in extreme Arctic conditions. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara notes, "creates a sense of inferiority that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." The artist is a former writer, young adult author, and land defender, who is from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that generates the chance to alter your outlook or spark some humbleness," she states.

A Tribute to Indigenous Heritage

The maze-like installation is among various elements in Sara's immersive commission honoring the culture, knowledge, and philosophy of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi count about 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They have experienced discrimination, integration policies, and suppression of their tongue by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the installation also spotlights the community's issues relating to the environmental emergency, property rights, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Materials

Along the extended entry incline, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot sculpture of reindeer hides trapped by electrical wires. It represents a metaphor for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part heavenly staircase, this section of the installation, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, wherein solid sheets of ice form as varying weather thaw and ice over the snow, locking in the reindeers' key cold-season food, moss. Goavvi is a result of climate change, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than in other regions.

Previously, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi herders on their motorized sleds in freezing temperatures as they carried carts of food pellets on to the barren tundra to dispense through labor. These animals gathered round us, digging the frozen ground in vain for lichen-covered morsels. This costly and laborious procedure is having a significant influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. However the choice is malnutrition. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are dying—a number from lack of food, others drowning after plunging into streams through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the installation is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm introducing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

The installation also highlights the stark difference between the industrial interpretation of electricity as a asset to be exploited for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi outlook of energy as an inherent power in animals, people, and nature. Tate Modern's legacy as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as eco-imperialism by regional governments. While attempting to be leaders for sustainable power, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, river barriers, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their human rights, incomes, and culture are endangered. "It's hard being such a tiny group to stand your ground when the reasons are based on saving the world," Sara observes. "Mining practices has co-opted the discourse of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to maintain patterns of consumption."

Personal Struggles

Sara and her family have personally conflicted with the state authorities over its increasingly stringent rules on herding. In 2016, Sara's sibling initiated a series of finally failed lawsuits over the forced culling of his herd, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara produced a extended set of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal curtain of 400 reindeer skulls, which was shown at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the lobby.

Art as Activism

Among the community, creative work seems the exclusive sphere in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|