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Guests to the renowned gallery are familiar to unexpected experiences in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have basked under an simulated sun, descended down helter skelters, and seen AI-powered jellyfish floating through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nose cavities of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this huge space—created by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a winding construction based on the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nasal passages. Inside, they can meander around or chill out on reindeer hides, tuning in on earphones to community leaders telling stories and insights.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It could appear playful, but the installation pays tribute to a little-known natural marvel: researchers have discovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it takes in by eighty degrees, enabling the creature to survive in extreme Arctic conditions. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "generates a perception of insignificance that you as a person are not in control over nature." The artist is a former reporter, young adult author, and land defender, who hails from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Maybe that fosters the possibility to change your viewpoint or trigger some humility," she adds.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The winding design is part of a components in Sara's immersive commission showcasing the traditions, understanding, and philosophy of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They have faced oppression, cultural suppression, and suppression of their language by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the art also highlights the people's struggles relating to the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Components

On the long entrance slope, there's a soaring, 26-meter sculpture of pelts trapped by utility lines. It can be read as a symbol for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this part of the artwork, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, in which thick layers of ice appear as fluctuating weather liquefy and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' key cold-season nourishment, fungus. This phenomenon is a outcome of planetary warming, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Polar region than elsewhere.

Previously, I met with Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and joined Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they transported trailers of animal nutrition on to the exposed frozen landscape to distribute by hand. The herd crowded round us, scratching the icy ground in futility for vegetative bits. This expensive and labour-intensive process is having a severe effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. But the alternative is malnutrition. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—some from hunger, others suffocating after falling into water bodies through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the work is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm introducing the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Perspectives

The sculpture also highlights the clear difference between the western interpretation of electricity as a asset to be harnessed for profit and existence and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an innate life force in animals, people, and the environment. Tate Modern's past as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider eco-imperialism by Nordic countries. While attempting to be standard bearers for sustainable power, Nordic nations have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, river barriers, and mines on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their legal protections, ways of life, and traditions are endangered. "It's challenging being such a limited population to stand your ground when the arguments are grounded in environmental protection," Sara observes. "Mining practices has adopted the language of ecology, but still it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to maintain patterns of consumption."

Family Struggles

Sara and her relatives have themselves conflicted with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter rules on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's brother embarked on a set of ultimately unsuccessful court actions over the forced culling of his livestock, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara created a extended series of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal drape of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it resides in the entrance.

Art as Advocacy

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work seems the only sphere in which they can be heard by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|