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Visitors to the renowned gallery are accustomed to surprising encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an artificial sun, descended down helter skelters, and seen AI-powered sea creatures floating through the air. However this marks the first time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nasal chambers of a reindeer. The newest artistic project for this huge space—developed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a winding design based on the expanded inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Upon entering, they can stroll around or chill out on skins, tuning in on earphones to tribal seniors imparting tales and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It may sound whimsical, but the artwork honors a little-known natural marvel: scientists have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it inhales by 80°C, allowing the animal to survive in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "produces a sense of insignificance that you as a human being are not in control over nature." She is a ex- journalist, children's author, and land defender, who comes from a pastoral family in northern Norway. "Possibly that generates the possibility to alter your outlook or spark some modesty," she states.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The maze-like structure is one of several components in Sara's absorbing commission celebrating the culture, science, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They have faced discrimination, forced assimilation, and eradication of their language by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the installation also spotlights the community's struggles connected to the global warming, loss of territory, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Components

At the long entrance incline, there's a soaring, 26-metre formation of skins ensnared by electrical wires. It can be read as a analogy for the societal frameworks restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this section of the exhibit, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which solid sheets of ice appear as varying conditions melt and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' key cold-season nourishment, lichen. The condition is a consequence of climate change, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Far North than globally.

Previously, I met with Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi herders on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they carried carts of animal nutrition on to the barren frozen landscape to distribute through labor. The reindeer crowded round us, digging the frozen ground in futility for vegetative morsels. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive procedure is having a severe influence on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. But the alternative is malnutrition. As these icy periods become routine, reindeer are perishing—a number from lack of food, others drowning after sinking in streams through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the installation is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm introducing the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

The installation also underscores the stark contrast between the industrial view of electricity as a asset to be utilized for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an inherent power in creatures, people, and land. Tate Modern's history as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by regional governments. While attempting to be standard bearers for clean sources, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the development of wind energy projects, water power facilities, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, livelihoods, and culture are endangered. "It's hard being such a limited population to protect your rights when the reasons are based on global sustainability," Sara comments. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the rhetoric of ecology, but still it's just attempting to find alternative ways to persist in habits of use."

Personal Struggles

Sara and her kin have personally disagreed with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter regulations on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's brother initiated a series of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the required reduction of his herd, apparently to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara created a multi-year set of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive drape of four hundred animal bones, which was shown at the 2017 event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it is displayed in the entryway.

The Role of Art in Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work appears the exclusive sphere in which they can be heard by outsiders. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|