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Guests to the renowned gallery are familiar to unusual experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an artificial sun, glided down spiral slides, and seen AI-powered sea creatures hovering through the air. However this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nasal chambers of a reindeer. The current artist commission for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a maze-like structure modeled after the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Upon entering, they can stroll around or unwind on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to Sámi elders telling stories and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It may seem whimsical, but the installation pays tribute to a rarely recognized biological feat: scientists have discovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it takes in by eighty degrees, helping the animal to endure in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "creates a perception of smallness that you as a person are not superior over nature." Sara is a former writer, young adult author, and environmental activist, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Possibly that generates the chance to change your outlook or evoke some humbleness," she states.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The maze-like installation is part of a components in Sara's engaging commission showcasing the culture, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They have experienced persecution, integration policies, and eradication of their language by all four nations. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the work also spotlights the group's issues connected to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Components

On the long access ramp, there's a towering, 26-meter sculpture of reindeer hides entangled by power and light cables. It can be read as a metaphor for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this part of the artwork, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which thick sheets of ice develop as varying weather melt and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' key winter food, fungus. Goavvi is a consequence of planetary warming, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than elsewhere.

Previously, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a icy season and went with Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they carried carts of supplementary feed on to the barren Arctic plains to provide through labor. The herd crowded round us, digging the frozen ground in futility for lichen-covered morsels. This costly and labour-intensive method is having a drastic effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the other option is starvation. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are dying—a number from starvation, others submerging after falling into water bodies through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the work is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of elements, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Perspectives

The installation also underscores the clear difference between the industrial interpretation of electricity as a asset to be harnessed for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of energy as an innate life force in animals, individuals, and nature. Tate Modern's legacy as a fossil fuel plant is connected to this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by Nordic countries. In their efforts to be leaders for sustainable power, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, river barriers, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, livelihoods, and way of life are at risk. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to stand your ground when the justifications are rooted in saving the world," Sara comments. "Mining practices has appropriated the discourse of sustainability, but yet it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to continue habits of consumption."

Family Challenges

The artist and her family have personally clashed with the Norwegian government over its tightening regulations on herding. A few years ago, Sara's brother undertook a set of ultimately unsuccessful court actions over the forced culling of his herd, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara produced a multi-year collection of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal curtain of four hundred animal bones, which was shown at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it resides in the entryway.

Art as Activism

For many Sámi, creative work appears the only realm in which they can be understood by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|