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Guests to the renowned gallery are familiar to unusual experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an artificial sun, descended down helter skelters, and witnessed automated sea creatures hovering through the air. Yet this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this huge space—developed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a maze-like design modeled after the expanded interior of a reindeer's nasal passages. Upon entering, they can wander around or unwind on reindeer hides, tuning in on headphones to community leaders telling stories and insights.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why the nose? It may sound whimsical, but the exhibit celebrates a little-known scientific wonder: researchers have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it breathes in by eighty degrees, helping the animal to thrive in extreme Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "produces a perception of smallness that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." Sara is a former writer, young adult author, and land defender, who hails from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Maybe that fosters the chance to change your outlook or spark some modesty," she adds.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The winding structure is part of a components in Sara's absorbing art project showcasing the traditions, science, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number roughly 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They've faced persecution, forced assimilation, and suppression of their dialect by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the work also spotlights the group's struggles associated with the global warming, loss of territory, and external control.

Metaphor in Components

At the lengthy access incline, there's a soaring, 26-meter sculpture of reindeer hides ensnared by utility lines. It can be read as a symbol for the political and economic systems restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this section of the artwork, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which dense layers of ice appear as fluctuating conditions liquefy and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary cold-season sustenance, fungus. Goavvi is a outcome of climate change, which is taking place up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than in other regions.

A few years back, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they hauled carts of supplementary feed on to the exposed tundra to dispense manually. The herd crowded round us, scratching the frozen ground in vain attempts for vegetative pieces. This expensive and demanding method is having a severe influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. Yet the alternative is malnutrition. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are dying—a number from hunger, others drowning after falling into lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the work is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

This artwork also highlights the stark divergence between the modern view of energy as a resource to be harnessed for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of energy as an innate life force in creatures, humans, and nature. Tate Modern's past as a fossil fuel plant is connected to this, as is what the Sámi consider eco-imperialism by regional governments. In their efforts to be leaders for renewable energy, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their human rights, livelihoods, and traditions are threatened. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to stand your ground when the reasons are grounded in global sustainability," Sara comments. "Extractivism has appropriated the rhetoric of environmentalism, but still it's just striving to find alternative ways to maintain patterns of expenditure."

Family Challenges

Sara and her kin have personally conflicted with the state authorities over its tightening rules on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's brother initiated a sequence of finally failed legal cases over the required reduction of his animals, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara developed a four-year set of creations named Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal curtain of numerous reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the 2017's art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it is displayed in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For many Sámi, visual expression appears the only sphere in which they can be understood by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|