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Visitors to the renowned gallery are accustomed to unusual experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They've basked under an simulated sun, slid down amusement rides, and observed robotic sea creatures hovering through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nose passages of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this cavernous space—developed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a labyrinthine design modeled after the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose passages. Inside, they can meander around or relax on skins, listening on headphones to tribal seniors imparting stories and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

Why choose the nasal structure? It could sound whimsical, but the exhibit honors a rarely recognized biological feat: researchers have discovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, helping the creature to thrive in extreme Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "produces a sense of smallness that you as a human being are not superior over nature." She is a former reporter, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Maybe that fosters the potential to alter your perspective or spark some modesty," she continues.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The maze-like design is one of several elements in Sara's immersive art project honoring the traditions, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number about 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They've endured persecution, integration policies, and suppression of their tongue by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the art also spotlights the group's issues relating to the climate crisis, property rights, and external control.

Meaning in Materials

At the extended access slope, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot structure of skins ensnared by electrical wires. It can be read as a analogy for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this section of the exhibit, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, wherein solid coatings of ice form as fluctuating temperatures melt and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary cold-season food, moss. Goavvi is a consequence of global heating, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than in other regions.

Previously, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they carried carts of food pellets on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to dispense through labor. The herd surrounded round us, scratching the frozen ground in vain for mossy bits. This expensive and laborious process is having a significant influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. However the choice is death. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are succumbing—some from lack of food, others submerging after plunging into streams through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the art is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

The installation also highlights the stark contrast between the industrial interpretation of power as a commodity to be exploited for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi worldview of life force as an natural life force in creatures, individuals, and land. The gallery's history as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by Nordic countries. While attempting to be standard bearers for sustainable power, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, water power facilities, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi contend their human rights, ways of life, and culture are at risk. "It's very difficult being such a tiny group to protect your rights when the justifications are based on global sustainability," Sara comments. "Mining practices has appropriated the rhetoric of ecology, but yet it's just striving to find better ways to persist in habits of consumption."

Family Conflicts

Sara and her relatives have themselves conflicted with the national administration over its tightening policies on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's sibling embarked on a set of finally failed legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a multi-year set of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi including a massive curtain of numerous reindeer skulls, which was shown at the the show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the lobby.

Art as Awareness

Among the community, creative work is the exclusive sphere in which they can be understood by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|