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Visitors to the renowned gallery are accustomed to surprising experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an man-made sun, glided down amusement rides, and witnessed robotic jellyfish floating through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nasal chambers of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this cavernous space—developed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a maze-like design based on the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nasal airways. Once inside, they can wander around or chill out on pelts, tuning in on earphones to Sámi elders sharing narratives and insights.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It could sound playful, but the exhibit pays tribute to a little-known scientific wonder: scientists have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the ambient air it inhales by eighty degrees, enabling the creature to thrive in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara explains, "generates a sense of smallness that you as a individual are not in control over nature." Sara is a ex- journalist, children's author, and rights advocate, who hails from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that generates the possibility to alter your outlook or spark some humbleness," she states.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The winding design is one of several features in Sara's engaging art project celebrating the culture, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They have faced discrimination, cultural suppression, and eradication of their tongue by all four states. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi mythology and origin tale, the art also spotlights the people's struggles relating to the climate crisis, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Materials

On the extended entrance ramp, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot formation of skins ensnared by power and light cables. It can be read as a analogy for the societal frameworks restricting the Sámi. Part pylon, part heavenly staircase, this section of the exhibit, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, wherein dense sheets of ice appear as changing weather melt and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary winter sustenance, lichen. Goavvi is a result of planetary warming, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than globally.

A few years back, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and joined Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they hauled trailers of supplementary feed on to the exposed Arctic plains to distribute through labor. The reindeer gathered round us, scratching the slippery ground in vain attempts for vegetative pieces. This costly and laborious process is having a severe influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. However the other option is death. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are dying—some from hunger, others submerging after falling into lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the work is a monument to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

This artwork also highlights the sharp difference between the western view of electricity as a asset to be harnessed for profit and survival and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an innate life force in animals, individuals, and land. Tate Modern's history as a fossil fuel plant is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be leaders for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, river barriers, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, livelihoods, and way of life are at risk. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to protect your rights when the arguments are grounded in global sustainability," Sara comments. "Extractivism has co-opted the language of ecology, but yet it's just attempting to find alternative ways to maintain practices of consumption."

Personal Struggles

She and her kin have personally clashed with the national administration over its ever-stricter policies on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's brother embarked on a series of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara produced a four-year series of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge curtain of numerous cranial remains, which was displayed at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the entrance.

The Role of Art in Activism

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