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Visitors to the renowned gallery are accustomed to unusual displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an artificial sun, slid down spiral slides, and seen AI-powered jellyfish drifting through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the complex nasal cavities of a reindeer. The latest artistic project for this cavernous space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a labyrinthine design based on the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Inside, they can stroll around or unwind on skins, listening on earphones to community leaders sharing stories and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It could sound quirky, but the exhibit honors a rarely recognized scientific wonder: scientists have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it breathes in by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the animal to survive in extreme Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "produces a feeling of smallness that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." She is a ex- writer, children's author, and rights advocate, who is from a pastoral family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that generates the chance to alter your viewpoint or spark some humbleness," she adds.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The maze-like design is one of several components in Sara's engaging art project celebrating the traditions, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They have faced discrimination, integration policies, and suppression of their dialect by all four nations. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the work also draws attention to the group's challenges associated with the climate crisis, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Elements

Along the long entry incline, there's a looming, 26-metre formation of pelts trapped by utility lines. It can be read as a metaphor for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part heavenly staircase, this section of the artwork, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an severe climatic event, in which solid sheets of ice appear as changing conditions thaw and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' key cold-season nourishment, moss. Goavvi is a result of global heating, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Far North than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they hauled trailers of food pellets on to the barren Arctic plains to provide manually. The reindeer crowded round us, scratching the frozen ground in vain attempts for mossy bits. This costly and laborious method is having a severe effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. But the choice is malnutrition. As goavvi winters become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—some from lack of food, others submerging after plunging into water bodies through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the installation is a monument to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Perspectives

The installation also underscores the clear divergence between the industrial interpretation of power as a asset to be utilized for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an inherent power in creatures, individuals, and land. Tate Modern's legacy as a fossil fuel plant is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by regional governments. In their efforts to be exemplars for clean sources, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, water power facilities, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi assert their human rights, ways of life, and way of life are endangered. "It's challenging being such a small minority to protect your rights when the arguments are grounded in saving the world," Sara notes. "Extractivism has appropriated the language of sustainability, but nonetheless it's just striving to find better ways to persist in patterns of consumption."

Individual Challenges

She and her relatives have personally conflicted with the state authorities over its increasingly stringent policies on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's brother initiated a set of finally failed lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara developed a four-year collection of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive drape of 400 animal bones, which was shown at the the show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, art seems the only realm in which they can be heard by outsiders. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|