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Visitors to the renowned gallery are familiar to unusual displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an artificial sun, glided down spiral slides, and observed robotic jellyfish hovering through the air. But this marks the first time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nose passages of a reindeer. The newest artistic project for this cavernous space—designed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a maze-like design inspired by the expanded inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Upon entering, they can meander around or chill out on reindeer hides, tuning in on headphones to Sámi elders imparting narratives and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It may seem whimsical, but the exhibit pays tribute to a rarely recognized scientific wonder: researchers have discovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it inhales by 80 degrees celsius, allowing the creature to endure in extreme Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "generates a feeling of inferiority that you as a person are not superior over nature." The artist is a former reporter, young adult author, and environmental activist, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Possibly that fosters the chance to change your viewpoint or spark some humility," she adds.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The maze-like design is one of several components in Sara's engaging art project showcasing the heritage, science, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number roughly 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They've experienced oppression, forced assimilation, and suppression of their language by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the art also highlights the people's struggles associated with the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Materials

Along the long entrance incline, there's a looming, 26-metre structure of reindeer hides entangled by electrical wires. It represents a metaphor for the political and economic systems restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this component of the exhibit, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby thick coatings of ice appear as fluctuating weather liquefy and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary cold-season sustenance, moss. This phenomenon is a consequence of planetary warming, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than in other regions.

Three years ago, I met with Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and joined Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they hauled containers of animal nutrition on to the barren frozen landscape to distribute by hand. The reindeer surrounded round us, pawing the icy ground in futility for mossy bits. This resource-intensive and demanding method is having a severe impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. However the other option is death. As goavvi winters become frequent, reindeer are perishing—a number from lack of food, others submerging after plunging into water bodies through prematurely melting ice. To some extent, the work is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

The installation also underscores the sharp difference between the western understanding of energy as a resource to be utilized for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of energy as an innate essence in animals, people, and land. Tate Modern's legacy as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by regional governments. As they strive to be leaders for clean sources, Nordic nations have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, river barriers, and extraction sites on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their human rights, incomes, and traditions are at risk. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to defend yourself when the justifications are grounded in environmental protection," Sara notes. "Mining practices has adopted the rhetoric of sustainability, but yet it's just aiming to find alternative ways to continue habits of consumption."

Individual Challenges

The artist and her family have themselves conflicted with the national administration over its ever-stricter regulations on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's sibling initiated a series of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, supposedly to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a multi-year series of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge drape of four hundred cranial remains, which was shown at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it resides in the lobby.

The Role of Art in Awareness

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