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Attendees to the renowned gallery are accustomed to surprising displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They have basked under an man-made sun, slid down amusement rides, and witnessed robotic jellyfish hovering through the air. However this marks the first time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nasal passages of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this cavernous space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a maze-like construction based on the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nose passages. Once inside, they can wander around or chill out on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to tribal seniors imparting tales and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It might appear whimsical, but the installation pays tribute to a obscure scientific wonder: experts have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it inhales by 80°C, helping the animal to thrive in extreme Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "creates a sense of inferiority that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." Sara is a former reporter, young adult author, and rights advocate, who comes from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that creates the potential to alter your outlook or spark some modesty," she continues.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The labyrinthine installation is one of several components in Sara's immersive commission honoring the culture, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Partially migratory, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They have faced discrimination, integration policies, and repression of their tongue by all four states. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the art also highlights the people's issues relating to the environmental emergency, property rights, and external control.

Metaphor in Components

On the lengthy entry ramp, there's a looming, 26-meter sculpture of skins trapped by utility lines. It serves as a analogy for the societal frameworks constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this part of the installation, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, whereby dense sheets of ice appear as changing temperatures thaw and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' key winter food, lichen. Goavvi is a result of planetary warming, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than in other regions.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they transported containers of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to provide through labor. These animals gathered round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain for vegetative pieces. This resource-intensive and demanding process is having a significant influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. But the choice is death. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are succumbing—a number from lack of food, others suffocating after sinking in water bodies through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the work is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

The installation also highlights the stark divergence between the industrial understanding of electricity as a resource to be exploited for gain and existence and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an inherent life force in creatures, people, and the environment. Tate Modern's past as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be leaders for renewable energy, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, river barriers, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi contend their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and traditions are threatened. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to protect your rights when the justifications are based on environmental protection," Sara observes. "Extractivism has appropriated the language of ecology, but still it's just attempting to find better ways to continue practices of expenditure."

Personal Struggles

The artist and her relatives have themselves disagreed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent regulations on herding. In 2016, Sara's sibling initiated a set of unsuccessful court actions over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, supposedly to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara developed a extended set of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a colossal screen of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the the event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the entrance.

The Role of Art in Awareness

Among the community, visual expression appears the exclusive domain in which they can be heard by outsiders. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|