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Attendees to the renowned gallery are familiar to unexpected displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an artificial sun, glided down helter skelters, and observed AI-powered sea creatures hovering through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this cavernous space—created by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a winding structure based on the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Inside, they can stroll around or unwind on skins, tuning in on headphones to Sámi elders sharing tales and insights.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It could sound whimsical, but the installation pays tribute to a little-known natural marvel: scientists have found that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the surrounding air it inhales by 80°C, enabling the creature to survive in extreme Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "creates a sense of insignificance that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." She is a former reporter, children's author, and land defender, who comes from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that creates the potential to change your viewpoint or spark some humbleness," she states.

A Tribute to Indigenous Heritage

The labyrinthine structure is one of several elements in Sara's absorbing commission celebrating the culture, knowledge, and philosophy of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They've experienced oppression, cultural suppression, and repression of their language by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the work also spotlights the community's struggles relating to the climate crisis, land dispossession, and external control.

Symbolism in Components

At the long entry incline, there's a towering, 26-meter formation of skins ensnared by electrical wires. It can be read as a analogy for the societal frameworks constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this part of the installation, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, in which thick coatings of ice form as changing conditions liquefy and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary cold-season nourishment, moss. Goavvi is a consequence of climate change, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Far North than elsewhere.

Previously, I met with Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they carried containers of animal nutrition on to the barren tundra to distribute through labor. The reindeer gathered round us, digging the slippery ground in futility for mossy bits. This costly and demanding procedure is having a drastic effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. But the other option is starvation. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are dying—some from hunger, others submerging after plunging into streams through prematurely melting ice. To some extent, the work is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

This artwork also highlights the sharp difference between the modern interpretation of electricity as a resource to be harnessed for gain and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of life force as an innate essence in creatures, humans, and the environment. The gallery's history as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by regional governments. While attempting to be standard bearers for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and way of life are threatened. "It's hard being such a small minority to defend yourself when the arguments are rooted in saving the world," Sara observes. "Extractivism has co-opted the rhetoric of sustainability, but still it's just attempting to find better ways to persist in habits of use."

Family Conflicts

Sara and her kin have personally conflicted with the national administration over its increasingly stringent policies on herding. In 2016, Sara's brother undertook a set of finally failed legal cases over the forced culling of his herd, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a multi-year series of creations called Pile O'Sápmi including a massive curtain of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it resides in the entryway.

The Role of Art in Activism

Among the community, visual expression appears the exclusive domain in which they can be listened to by the global community. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|