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Visitors to the renowned gallery are familiar to unexpected experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an simulated sun, glided down amusement rides, and seen AI-powered sea creatures floating through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nose passages of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this immense space—developed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes patrons into a winding construction inspired by the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose cavities. Once inside, they can wander around or chill out on pelts, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors imparting stories and insights.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It could sound playful, but the artwork honors a obscure natural marvel: experts have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it takes in by eighty degrees, helping the animal to survive in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "produces a sense of insignificance that you as a human being are not in control over nature." She is a former journalist, writer for kids, and land defender, who hails from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Possibly that generates the chance to shift your viewpoint or evoke some humbleness," she adds.

An Homage to Indigenous Heritage

The labyrinthine installation is part of a components in Sara's engaging art project honoring the heritage, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total about 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They've endured persecution, integration policies, and eradication of their language by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the art also highlights the community's challenges connected to the global warming, loss of territory, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Components

At the lengthy entrance ramp, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot sculpture of skins ensnared by electrical wires. It serves as a analogy for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Part pylon, part heavenly staircase, this component of the installation, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, whereby solid layers of ice form as changing weather thaw and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary cold-season food, lichen. The condition is a result of planetary warming, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Polar region than in other regions.

A few years back, I met with Sara in a remote town during a icy season and joined Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they transported containers of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to provide manually. The herd surrounded round us, digging the icy ground in futility for lichen-covered bits. This expensive and labour-intensive method is having a drastic influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the choice is malnutrition. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are perishing—a number from hunger, others suffocating after plunging into streams through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the art is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

The sculpture also underscores the stark contrast between the modern interpretation of power as a resource to be harnessed for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of life force as an innate power in animals, humans, and nature. Tate Modern's past as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by regional governments. In their efforts to be standard bearers for sustainable power, these states have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, river barriers, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi argue their legal protections, incomes, and traditions are threatened. "It's hard being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the justifications are grounded in global sustainability," Sara notes. "Extractivism has adopted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but yet it's just attempting to find alternative ways to maintain practices of consumption."

Personal Conflicts

Sara and her family have themselves disagreed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent policies on herding. In 2016, Sara's brother embarked on a series of ultimately unsuccessful court actions over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara developed a multi-year series of creations named Pile O'Sápmi including a huge curtain of 400 cranial remains, which was shown at the 2017's art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it hangs in the entrance.

Art as Advocacy

For numerous Indigenous people, visual expression seems the exclusive realm in which they can be heard by the global community. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|