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Attendees to the renowned gallery are used to unusual encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an artificial sun, glided down helter skelters, and seen automated jellyfish floating through the air. But this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nose cavities of a reindeer. The newest artistic project for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a winding structure based on the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose passages. Once inside, they can wander around or chill out on pelts, tuning in on earphones to community leaders sharing stories and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It may appear playful, but the artwork honors a rarely recognized scientific wonder: experts have discovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it breathes in by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the animal to endure in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "produces a feeling of insignificance that you as a individual are not superior over nature." She is a former writer, children's author, and environmental activist, who is from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that fosters the potential to shift your perspective or evoke some humility," she adds.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The labyrinthine installation is part of a features in Sara's engaging art project honoring the culture, understanding, and philosophy of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count about 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They have endured persecution, forced assimilation, and repression of their language by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the work also spotlights the people's struggles relating to the global warming, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Meaning in Elements

At the extended access slope, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot structure of reindeer hides ensnared by electrical wires. It can be read as a symbol for the societal frameworks restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this section of the installation, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, in which thick coatings of ice develop as fluctuating conditions thaw and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' primary winter food, moss. The condition is a consequence of climate change, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than globally.

Previously, I traveled to see Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they hauled trailers of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to provide through labor. The herd surrounded round us, scratching the frozen ground in vain attempts for vegetative morsels. This costly and laborious method is having a drastic impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. However the other option is starvation. As goavvi winters become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—some from lack of food, others suffocating after plunging into lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the art is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

This artwork also underscores the sharp difference between the modern understanding of power as a asset to be exploited for profit and existence and the Sámi outlook of energy as an inherent power in creatures, individuals, and land. Tate Modern's history as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be exemplars for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have clashed with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and way of life are endangered. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the arguments are grounded in environmental protection," Sara notes. "Extractivism has appropriated the rhetoric of environmentalism, but yet it's just aiming to find alternative ways to persist in patterns of expenditure."

Family Struggles

Sara and her relatives have themselves clashed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent regulations on animal husbandry. Previously, Sara's brother initiated a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara produced a extended series of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal curtain of numerous cranial remains, which was displayed at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it is displayed in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

Among the community, visual expression appears the only domain in which they can be listened to by outsiders. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|