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Guests to the renowned gallery are accustomed to unexpected displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an simulated sun, slid down spiral slides, and witnessed AI-powered jellyfish hovering through the air. However this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nasal chambers of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a winding structure based on the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Inside, they can wander around or chill out on pelts, listening on headphones to community leaders telling narratives and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why the nose? It could appear whimsical, but the exhibit honors a little-known natural marvel: scientists have discovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it inhales by 80°C, allowing the creature to thrive in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "produces a feeling of inferiority that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." The artist is a former writer, writer for kids, and land defender, who is from a reindeer-herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that generates the potential to alter your outlook or evoke some modesty," she adds.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The maze-like installation is among various elements in Sara's absorbing commission honoring the heritage, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They've experienced discrimination, cultural suppression, and repression of their dialect by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi mythology and origin tale, the work also spotlights the community's struggles associated with the environmental emergency, property rights, and imperialism.

Meaning in Materials

At the long entry incline, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot structure of reindeer hides trapped by utility lines. It serves as a analogy for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this section of the installation, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, whereby solid layers of ice form as fluctuating weather liquefy and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' main cold-season sustenance, lichen. Goavvi is a result of climate change, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than globally.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they transported carts of supplementary feed on to the exposed tundra to dispense through labor. The reindeer gathered round us, digging the slippery ground in vain for mossy morsels. This expensive and labour-intensive procedure is having a severe influence on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the alternative is malnutrition. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—some from starvation, others submerging after plunging into water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. In a sense, the art is a monument to them. "With the layering of elements, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

The installation also emphasizes the stark contrast between the industrial interpretation of energy as a commodity to be harnessed for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an innate power in creatures, people, and land. The gallery's history as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider environmental exploitation by Nordic countries. In their efforts to be standard bearers for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have clashed with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, river barriers, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi argue their human rights, incomes, and culture are at risk. "It's challenging being such a limited population to stand your ground when the arguments are based on saving the world," Sara comments. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the rhetoric of ecology, but yet it's just attempting to find better ways to continue practices of consumption."

Personal Conflicts

She and her relatives have themselves disagreed with the state authorities over its increasingly stringent regulations on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's brother initiated a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful court actions over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, apparently to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara created a four-year collection of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge screen of four hundred animal bones, which was exhibited at the 2017's art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it hangs in the entryway.

Art as Activism

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