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Visitors to the renowned gallery are familiar to unexpected displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an simulated sun, glided down amusement rides, and observed AI-powered jellyfish hovering through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nasal passages of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this cavernous space—created by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a maze-like design based on the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose cavities. Inside, they can stroll around or chill out on skins, listening on headphones to Sámi elders telling tales and insights.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It may appear playful, but the exhibit honors a little-known biological feat: experts have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it breathes in by 80°C, helping the animal to thrive in extreme Arctic climates. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "produces a sense of inferiority that you as a person are not in control over nature." She is a former writer, children's author, and rights advocate, who hails from a pastoral family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that creates the potential to shift your viewpoint or trigger some humility," she continues.

A Tribute to Indigenous Heritage

The labyrinthine structure is part of a elements in Sara's immersive art project celebrating the traditions, science, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Partially migratory, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They've faced persecution, integration policies, and repression of their language by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the installation also draws attention to the group's struggles relating to the climate crisis, property rights, and external control.

Meaning in Elements

At the long entry incline, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot structure of pelts entangled by power and light cables. It represents a symbol for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this part of the exhibit, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which thick sheets of ice develop as varying temperatures liquefy and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' key winter sustenance, fungus. This phenomenon is a consequence of global heating, which is happening up to four times faster in the Polar region than elsewhere.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a icy season and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they transported carts of food pellets on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to provide through labor. The reindeer crowded round us, pawing the icy ground in futility for vegetative pieces. This expensive and labour-intensive procedure is having a severe effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. But the alternative is death. As goavvi winters become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—a number from hunger, others submerging after plunging into streams through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the work is a memorial to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Perspectives

This artwork also underscores the stark difference between the modern view of electricity as a commodity to be exploited for profit and survival and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an innate essence in creatures, humans, and the environment. Tate Modern's history as a coal and oil power station is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by regional governments. While attempting to be exemplars for renewable energy, these states have locked horns with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their human rights, livelihoods, and traditions are at risk. "It's very difficult being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the arguments are based on saving the world," Sara comments. "Mining practices has co-opted the discourse of ecology, but still it's just attempting to find alternative ways to persist in practices of consumption."

Family Conflicts

The artist and her family have themselves disagreed with the state authorities over its increasingly stringent policies on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's brother embarked on a set of unsuccessful lawsuits over the forced culling of his herd, apparently to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a four-year set of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi including a huge curtain of 400 cranial remains, which was displayed at the the event Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it resides in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, visual expression seems the exclusive sphere in which they can be heard by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|