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Visitors to the renowned gallery are familiar to unusual experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an artificial sun, slid down spiral slides, and witnessed robotic sea creatures hovering through the air. However this marks the first time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nasal chambers of a reindeer. The latest artistic project for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a labyrinthine construction modeled after the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Upon entering, they can meander around or relax on pelts, listening on headphones to tribal seniors imparting stories and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It might seem whimsical, but the exhibit celebrates a little-known biological feat: experts have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the ambient air it breathes in by 80°C, enabling the animal to survive in harsh Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "generates a perception of insignificance that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." The artist is a ex- journalist, young adult author, and rights advocate, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Maybe that generates the chance to shift your viewpoint or spark some modesty," she states.

A Tribute to Indigenous Heritage

The winding installation is part of a components in Sara's engaging art project honoring the culture, knowledge, and philosophy of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They have faced discrimination, forced assimilation, and suppression of their tongue by all four nations. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the work also highlights the group's struggles relating to the global warming, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Materials

Along the lengthy entrance ramp, there's a soaring, 26-meter formation of skins ensnared by utility lines. It represents a symbol for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this section of the installation, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein dense layers of ice develop as varying weather liquefy and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary cold-season nourishment, fungus. This phenomenon is a consequence of climate change, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Far North than globally.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they carried carts of food pellets on to the exposed tundra to provide manually. These animals gathered round us, pawing the frozen ground in futility for vegetative bits. This resource-intensive and laborious method is having a significant influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. Yet the other option is starvation. As goavvi winters become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—some from lack of food, others drowning after sinking in water bodies through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the art is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm introducing the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

The installation also emphasizes the sharp contrast between the modern interpretation of power as a asset to be utilized for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi outlook of energy as an innate power in creatures, individuals, and nature. This venue's history as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as eco-imperialism by Nordic countries. As they strive to be leaders for sustainable power, Nordic nations have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, river barriers, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and traditions are at risk. "It's hard being such a small minority to defend yourself when the arguments are based on saving the world," Sara comments. "Extractivism has adopted the rhetoric of ecology, but yet it's just attempting to find alternative ways to maintain practices of use."

Personal Struggles

The artist and her family have personally disagreed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent rules on herding. A few years ago, Sara's sibling undertook a sequence of unsuccessful legal cases over the required reduction of his livestock, apparently to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara produced a multi-year series of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a colossal screen of numerous cranial remains, which was displayed at the the show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the public gallery, where it is displayed in the entryway.

The Role of Art in Advocacy

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