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Visitors to the renowned gallery are accustomed to unexpected experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've basked under an simulated sun, descended down helter skelters, and seen AI-powered sea creatures hovering through the air. But this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nasal cavities of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this cavernous space—developed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a labyrinthine design modeled after the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Upon entering, they can stroll around or relax on pelts, tuning in on earphones to community leaders telling narratives and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

Why choose the nasal structure? It might seem quirky, but the exhibit celebrates a little-known natural marvel: experts have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it breathes in by 80°C, enabling the creature to endure in inhospitable Arctic climates. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "generates a sense of inferiority that you as a individual are not in control over nature." Sara is a former reporter, young adult author, and environmental activist, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that creates the possibility to change your outlook or spark some humbleness," she adds.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The maze-like design is part of a elements in Sara's absorbing exhibition showcasing the traditions, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They have faced discrimination, forced assimilation, and suppression of their tongue by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the art also spotlights the community's challenges relating to the climate crisis, loss of territory, and external control.

Meaning in Elements

On the lengthy entry slope, there's a towering, eighty-five-foot formation of reindeer hides ensnared by utility lines. It represents a symbol for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part heavenly staircase, this component of the exhibit, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, wherein thick coatings of ice form as varying temperatures liquefy and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' main winter food, lichen. Goavvi is a consequence of global heating, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Far North than globally.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a icy season and joined Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they transported containers of animal nutrition on to the barren frozen landscape to dispense through labor. These animals crowded round us, pawing the icy ground in vain for lichen-covered pieces. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive procedure is having a severe impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. However the choice is malnutrition. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—some from lack of food, others suffocating after sinking in lakes and rivers through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the installation is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Perspectives

The installation also underscores the sharp difference between the western understanding of power as a asset to be harnessed for profit and survival and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an innate power in creatures, people, and nature. The gallery's legacy as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by regional governments. While attempting to be exemplars for renewable energy, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, water power facilities, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, livelihoods, and culture are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to stand your ground when the justifications are grounded in global sustainability," Sara notes. "Extractivism has appropriated the language of environmentalism, but still it's just aiming to find better ways to maintain patterns of use."

Personal Conflicts

She and her relatives have personally conflicted with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent rules on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's sibling undertook a series of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the required reduction of his herd, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara created a extended set of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge screen of 400 cranial remains, which was displayed at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it hangs in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For many Sámi, creative work is the only domain in which they can be heard by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|