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Guests to the renowned gallery are used to surprising encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have basked under an man-made sun, glided down helter skelters, and witnessed robotic jellyfish hovering through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be venturing themselves in the complex nasal passages of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this huge space—developed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a labyrinthine construction modeled after the expanded interior of a reindeer's nasal passages. Once inside, they can meander around or chill out on pelts, listening on headphones to tribal seniors telling narratives and insights.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why choose the nasal structure? It might appear whimsical, but the installation celebrates a little-known scientific wonder: experts have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it inhales by eighty degrees, enabling the creature to endure in extreme Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "produces a sense of inferiority that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." The artist is a ex- journalist, children's author, and rights advocate, who comes from a pastoral family in northern Norway. "Maybe that creates the chance to change your viewpoint or spark some humility," she states.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The labyrinthine installation is among various elements in Sara's engaging exhibition celebrating the culture, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They've endured persecution, cultural suppression, and suppression of their dialect by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the work also highlights the group's issues relating to the climate crisis, property rights, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Elements

Along the lengthy access slope, there's a soaring, 26-metre sculpture of pelts entangled by power and light cables. It can be read as a symbol for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this section of the artwork, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein thick sheets of ice appear as varying weather thaw and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' key winter nourishment, moss. This phenomenon is a outcome of planetary warming, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than globally.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they carried containers of supplementary feed on to the exposed Arctic plains to provide by hand. These animals crowded round us, pawing the frozen ground in vain attempts for lichen-covered bits. This expensive and laborious process is having a drastic influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. However the choice is starvation. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—a number from starvation, others submerging after sinking in water bodies through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the installation 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 sharp difference between the industrial view of energy as a resource to be utilized for gain and survival and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an natural power in animals, people, and the environment. Tate Modern's history as a coal and oil power station is connected to this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by Nordic countries. While attempting to be leaders for sustainable power, Nordic nations have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their traditional territory; the Sámi argue their legal protections, incomes, and way of life are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the arguments are grounded in global sustainability," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the language of environmentalism, but yet it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to maintain practices of expenditure."

Personal Challenges

She and her kin have personally disagreed with the Norwegian government over its tightening rules on herding. Previously, Sara's sibling initiated a series of finally failed legal cases over the forced culling of his herd, apparently to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara produced a four-year collection of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge screen of four hundred cranial remains, which was shown at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it is displayed in the entryway.

Art as Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, art appears the sole realm in which they can be heard by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|