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Guests to the renowned gallery are familiar to surprising experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an man-made sun, glided down spiral slides, and observed automated jellyfish hovering through the air. But this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this cavernous space—created by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a maze-like structure based on the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Once inside, they can meander around or chill out on skins, tuning in on earphones to Sámi elders telling stories and insights.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It may seem whimsical, but the installation celebrates a rarely recognized biological feat: researchers have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it breathes in by 80°C, enabling the creature to endure in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "produces a sense of inferiority that you as a human being are not in control over nature." She is a ex- writer, children's author, and environmental activist, who comes from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that generates the potential to change your viewpoint or spark some modesty," she states.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The winding installation is among various elements in Sara's absorbing exhibition honoring the heritage, knowledge, and philosophy of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They have experienced oppression, integration policies, and eradication of their dialect by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the art also spotlights the people's issues associated with the global warming, loss of territory, and external control.

Metaphor in Elements

At the extended entrance ramp, there's a towering, 26-meter sculpture of skins entangled by power and light cables. It can be read as a symbol for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this component of the installation, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an severe climatic event, in which solid layers of ice develop as changing conditions melt and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary cold-season nourishment, moss. This phenomenon is a outcome of global heating, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than in other regions.

A few years back, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they hauled carts of supplementary feed on to the barren Arctic plains to dispense manually. The reindeer crowded round us, scratching the frozen ground in futility for mossy bits. This costly and demanding procedure is having a drastic influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. However the other option is starvation. As these icy periods become routine, reindeer are succumbing—some from lack of food, others drowning after falling into water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the installation is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm introducing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

The installation also underscores the clear difference between the modern understanding of power as a resource to be harnessed for profit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an inherent essence in animals, individuals, and the environment. Tate Modern's past as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be exemplars for clean sources, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and traditions are at risk. "It's hard being such a limited population to protect your rights when the arguments are rooted in global sustainability," Sara notes. "Mining practices has appropriated the language of sustainability, but still it's just striving to find better ways to persist in habits of expenditure."

Family Conflicts

The artist and her relatives have personally disagreed with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent rules on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's brother embarked on a series of unsuccessful legal cases over the forced culling of his animals, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara produced a multi-year collection of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi featuring a colossal curtain of four hundred animal bones, which was exhibited at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it is displayed in the entrance.

The Role of Art in Advocacy

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