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Attendees to the renowned gallery are accustomed to surprising encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an man-made sun, glided down helter skelters, and witnessed robotic sea creatures floating through the air. Yet this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nasal passages of a reindeer. The latest artistic project for this cavernous space—designed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a winding construction inspired by the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Inside, they can wander around or relax on skins, listening on earphones to Sámi elders telling stories and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It could appear whimsical, but the artwork pays tribute to a little-known natural marvel: scientists have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it inhales by eighty degrees, helping the animal to endure in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara notes, "creates a sense of smallness that you as a human being are not in control over nature." The artist is a former reporter, young adult author, and rights advocate, who hails from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Maybe that fosters the possibility to alter your perspective or spark some modesty," she adds.

A Celebration to Indigenous Heritage

The labyrinthine installation is one of several components in Sara's engaging art project showcasing the heritage, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They've faced persecution, cultural suppression, and eradication of their language by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the art also draws attention to the community's challenges connected to the climate crisis, land dispossession, and external control.

Meaning in Materials

At the lengthy access incline, there's a soaring, 26-metre structure of pelts trapped by electrical wires. It serves as a metaphor for the political and economic systems restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this part of the artwork, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which solid layers of ice appear as varying conditions liquefy and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' main winter nourishment, moss. This phenomenon is a result of climate change, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than elsewhere.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi herders on their motorized sleds in freezing temperatures as they transported carts of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured tundra to provide through labor. The reindeer crowded round us, digging the frozen ground in futility for mossy morsels. This costly and demanding method is having a severe impact on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. However the other option is starvation. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—a number from hunger, others suffocating 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 introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

The installation also underscores the clear difference between the industrial understanding of power as a commodity to be harnessed for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi worldview of life force as an inherent essence in creatures, people, and the environment. This venue's past as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by regional governments. As they strive to be standard bearers for sustainable power, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the development of windfarms, hydroelectric dams, and mines on their traditional territory; the Sámi argue their human rights, ways of life, and culture are at risk. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to protect your rights when the reasons are grounded in environmental protection," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just attempting to find better ways to persist in patterns of consumption."

Family Conflicts

She and her family have themselves conflicted with the national administration over its ever-stricter regulations on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's sibling initiated a set of unsuccessful lawsuits over the forced culling of his livestock, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara produced a multi-year collection of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge screen of numerous reindeer skulls, which was shown at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the public gallery, where it is displayed in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, art seems the only domain in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|