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Guests to the renowned gallery are familiar to surprising encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an artificial sun, descended down amusement rides, and seen robotic sea creatures hovering through the air. Yet this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nasal passages of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this huge space—created by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages patrons into a maze-like structure modeled after the expanded inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Inside, they can meander around or relax on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to community leaders sharing tales and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It may appear whimsical, but the exhibit honors a rarely recognized biological feat: experts have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it takes in by 80°C, helping the animal to endure in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "produces a perception of smallness that you as a person are not in control over nature." Sara is a former reporter, children's author, and environmental activist, who is from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Possibly that creates the chance to change your viewpoint or evoke some humbleness," she adds.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The winding structure is part of a features in Sara's immersive commission showcasing the traditions, knowledge, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi total about 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They have endured persecution, integration policies, and repression of their language by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the art also draws attention to the group's issues connected to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Elements

At the extended access incline, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot formation of pelts ensnared by electrical wires. It represents a symbol for the political and economic systems restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this part of the artwork, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein solid sheets of ice form as changing weather melt and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary cold-season food, fungus. The condition is a result of global heating, which is occurring up to four times faster in the Polar region than globally.

Three years ago, I met with Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they hauled trailers of food pellets on to the barren Arctic plains to dispense by hand. The herd surrounded round us, digging the icy ground in vain for vegetative pieces. This costly and labour-intensive procedure is having a significant effect on herding practices—and on the animals' natural survival. However the alternative is death. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—a number from starvation, others submerging after plunging into streams through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the installation is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

The installation also underscores the sharp difference between the modern interpretation of power as a commodity to be harnessed for gain and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of life force as an innate life force in creatures, individuals, and the environment. Tate Modern's legacy as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by Nordic countries. As they strive to be leaders for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of windfarms, river barriers, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and culture are at risk. "It's challenging being such a limited population to protect your rights when the justifications are based on saving the world," Sara notes. "Mining practices has appropriated the rhetoric of ecology, but nonetheless it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to maintain patterns of consumption."

Personal Conflicts

The artist and her family have themselves conflicted with the Norwegian government over its tightening rules on herding. Previously, Sara's sibling undertook a sequence of finally failed legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara produced a extended series of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive curtain of 400 reindeer skulls, which was shown at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it resides in the lobby.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For many Sámi, visual expression seems the sole domain in which they can be listened to by the global community. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|