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Attendees to the renowned gallery are used to unusual displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They've basked under an artificial sun, descended down helter skelters, and witnessed robotic sea creatures drifting through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nasal cavities of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this huge space—developed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a labyrinthine structure inspired by the expanded interior of a reindeer's nasal airways. Once inside, they can wander around or chill out on skins, listening on headphones to community leaders sharing narratives and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It may sound whimsical, but the exhibit celebrates a obscure biological feat: researchers have found that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it breathes in by 80°C, allowing the animal to thrive in extreme Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "produces a feeling of smallness that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." The artist is a former reporter, young adult author, and rights advocate, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that fosters the chance to shift your outlook or spark some humility," she states.

A Tribute to Indigenous Heritage

The winding design is among various features in Sara's immersive art project celebrating the traditions, understanding, and philosophy of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Partially migratory, the Sámi number roughly 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They've endured discrimination, forced assimilation, and repression of their tongue by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the art also spotlights the people's issues connected to the global warming, property rights, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Elements

Along the extended entrance slope, there's a soaring, 26-meter structure of reindeer hides trapped by utility lines. It can be read as a symbol for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this component of the exhibit, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, whereby dense coatings of ice appear as varying temperatures thaw and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' key winter food, moss. This phenomenon is a result of planetary warming, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than in other regions.

A few years back, I visited Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they transported trailers of food pellets on to the barren Arctic plains to distribute manually. The herd crowded round us, pawing the icy ground in futility for mossy bits. This resource-intensive and laborious procedure is having a significant effect on herding practices—and on the animals' natural survival. But the alternative is starvation. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are dying—a number from lack of food, others drowning after sinking in water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. In a sense, the art is a memorial to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Perspectives

The sculpture also emphasizes the stark difference between the industrial understanding of energy as a commodity to be exploited for profit and survival and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an natural power in creatures, individuals, and the environment. Tate Modern's past as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be standard bearers for clean sources, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, water power facilities, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi contend their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and traditions are threatened. "It's hard being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the justifications are based on global sustainability," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the language of ecology, but still it's just striving to find more suitable ways to continue patterns of consumption."

Family Challenges

The artist and her kin have themselves disagreed with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent policies on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's brother undertook a set of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara developed a multi-year set of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive drape of 400 reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the the event Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, art seems the sole realm in which they can be understood by people of other nations. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|