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Attendees to the renowned gallery are accustomed to surprising encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an man-made sun, descended down helter skelters, and witnessed AI-powered sea creatures hovering through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nasal passages of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this cavernous space—designed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a winding construction modeled after the expanded inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Inside, they can meander around or chill out on skins, listening on earphones to community leaders imparting stories and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

Why choose the nasal structure? It may appear playful, but the installation pays tribute to a little-known scientific wonder: experts have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it inhales by eighty degrees, allowing the animal to endure in harsh Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara explains, "produces a perception of insignificance that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." The artist is a ex- journalist, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who is from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Possibly that generates the potential to alter your perspective or evoke some humbleness," she continues.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The winding installation is one of several features in Sara's immersive commission celebrating the heritage, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number roughly 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They've endured discrimination, forced assimilation, and repression of their dialect by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the work also spotlights the people's challenges associated with the climate crisis, land dispossession, and external control.

Symbolism in Elements

At the extended entrance incline, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot structure of pelts trapped by electrical wires. It serves as a symbol for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this section of the artwork, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which thick sheets of ice form as changing temperatures melt and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' main cold-season food, fungus. The condition is a consequence of global heating, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than globally.

A few years back, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi herders on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they transported containers of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to provide manually. These animals gathered round us, digging the slippery ground in vain for vegetative morsels. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive process is having a significant impact on herding practices—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the choice is malnutrition. As goavvi winters become frequent, reindeer are perishing—a number from hunger, others drowning after falling into water bodies through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the installation is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

This artwork also highlights the sharp divergence between the modern view of energy as a resource to be exploited for profit and existence and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an innate power in creatures, individuals, and the environment. Tate Modern's history as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by Nordic countries. In their efforts to be exemplars for clean sources, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the development of windfarms, water power facilities, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi contend their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and way of life are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to protect your rights when the justifications are rooted in global sustainability," Sara comments. "Mining practices has appropriated the language of ecology, but nonetheless it's just striving to find better ways to persist in habits of expenditure."

Personal Struggles

The artist and her family have personally clashed with the national administration over its ever-stricter rules on herding. In 2016, Sara's sibling initiated a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the required reduction of his animals, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara developed a four-year series of creations called Pile O'Sápmi including a huge screen of four hundred animal bones, which was exhibited at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it is displayed in the lobby.

Art as Advocacy

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work is the sole sphere in which they can be heard by outsiders. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|