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Attendees to the renowned gallery are familiar to unusual displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They've basked under an artificial sun, descended down amusement rides, and observed AI-powered sea creatures floating through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nasal cavities of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this cavernous space—designed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a maze-like structure based on the expanded inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Once inside, they can stroll around or chill out on pelts, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors telling stories and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It may appear quirky, but the installation honors a rarely recognized biological feat: scientists have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the ambient air it breathes in by eighty degrees, helping the creature to endure in extreme Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "creates a sense of insignificance that you as a human being are not superior over nature." The artist is a ex- writer, children's author, and rights advocate, who is from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Possibly that generates the potential to shift your outlook or evoke some modesty," she adds.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The maze-like installation is among various components in Sara's absorbing art project showcasing the heritage, understanding, and philosophy of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They've experienced oppression, forced assimilation, and suppression of their language by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi mythology and origin tale, the art also spotlights the community's challenges relating to the global warming, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Elements

Along the extended entrance ramp, there's a towering, 26-metre formation of reindeer hides ensnared by electrical wires. It serves as a analogy for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this part of the artwork, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, in which thick coatings of ice develop as varying weather thaw and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' main cold-season food, lichen. The condition is a outcome of planetary warming, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than globally.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and went with Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they transported trailers of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to dispense through labor. The reindeer crowded round us, scratching the slippery ground in futility for mossy morsels. This expensive and demanding method is having a significant effect on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. But the alternative is malnutrition. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—a number from lack of food, others suffocating after falling into water bodies through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the art is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of elements, in a way I'm introducing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

This artwork also highlights the sharp contrast between the western interpretation of electricity as a asset to be exploited for gain and survival and the Sámi worldview of life force as an inherent power in creatures, individuals, and land. The gallery's past 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, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, river barriers, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi contend their legal protections, ways of life, and culture are at risk. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the justifications are grounded in environmental protection," Sara notes. "Mining practices has adopted the rhetoric of ecology, but yet it's just aiming to find alternative ways to persist in habits of expenditure."

Individual Struggles

She and her family have themselves clashed with the national administration over its ever-stricter policies on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's brother initiated a set of unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara created a extended series of creations called Pile O'Sápmi including a huge drape of numerous reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the 2017 event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the national institution, where it is displayed in the entrance.

Art as Advocacy

Among the community, visual expression appears the sole sphere in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|