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Visitors to the renowned gallery are accustomed to surprising encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They've basked under an man-made sun, slid down amusement rides, and seen robotic jellyfish floating through the air. But this marks the first time they will be immersing themselves in the detailed nose cavities of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this immense space—designed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes patrons into a winding structure inspired by the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Once inside, they can wander around or unwind on skins, tuning in on headphones to community leaders sharing narratives and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It could appear playful, but the artwork honors a rarely recognized biological feat: researchers have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the ambient air it breathes in by 80 degrees celsius, allowing the creature to endure in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "generates a feeling of inferiority that you as a human being are not superior over nature." The artist is a ex- journalist, young adult author, and land defender, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Possibly that fosters the possibility to shift your outlook or evoke some modesty," she states.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The maze-like installation is among various elements in Sara's engaging exhibition honoring the traditions, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They have experienced oppression, forced assimilation, and suppression of their dialect by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the installation also spotlights the group's challenges connected to the climate crisis, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Meaning in Materials

On the long entry ramp, there's a looming, 26-metre structure of skins ensnared by power and light cables. It can be read as a analogy for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this part of the artwork, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi name for an harsh environmental condition, whereby solid sheets of ice develop as varying conditions liquefy and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' main winter sustenance, fungus. Goavvi is a result of planetary warming, which is occurring up to four times faster in the Polar region than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi reindeer keepers on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they transported carts of supplementary feed on to the exposed Arctic plains to provide through labor. The reindeer crowded round us, digging the frozen ground in futility for vegetative bits. This expensive and labour-intensive process is having a drastic influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. However the alternative is starvation. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are dying—a number from hunger, others submerging after falling into water bodies through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the art is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

The installation also underscores the sharp difference between the industrial understanding of power as a commodity to be harnessed for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of energy as an inherent essence in animals, individuals, and nature. The gallery's history as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by regional governments. As they strive to be exemplars for renewable energy, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the development of wind energy projects, river barriers, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their legal protections, livelihoods, and way of life are at risk. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to protect your rights when the justifications are rooted in environmental protection," Sara notes. "Mining practices has appropriated the language of ecology, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find better ways to persist in habits of use."

Family Struggles

The artist and her relatives have themselves conflicted with the state authorities over its ever-stricter policies on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's brother embarked on a sequence of finally failed legal cases over the forced culling of his herd, supposedly to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a multi-year collection of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi including a huge screen of four hundred animal bones, which was exhibited at the 2017's art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it resides in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Awareness

Among the community, art is the exclusive realm in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|