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Visitors to the renowned gallery are familiar to unexpected encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've basked under an simulated sun, glided down helter skelters, and witnessed robotic jellyfish hovering through the air. However this marks the first time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nose passages of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this huge space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a maze-like construction inspired by the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose cavities. Upon entering, they can stroll around or relax on pelts, listening on headphones to Sámi elders sharing stories and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It might seem whimsical, but the exhibit celebrates a little-known natural marvel: scientists have discovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it inhales by 80°C, allowing the animal to survive in inhospitable Arctic climates. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "creates a perception of smallness that you as a human being are not superior over nature." The artist is a former writer, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who hails from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that creates the potential to change your outlook or evoke some humbleness," she states.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The maze-like design is part of a elements in Sara's immersive exhibition honoring the traditions, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They have endured persecution, cultural suppression, and suppression of their dialect by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the installation also highlights the people's challenges associated with the climate crisis, land dispossession, and external control.

Symbolism in Materials

Along the long access incline, there's a looming, 26-meter sculpture of skins ensnared by electrical wires. It represents a symbol for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this section of the exhibit, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein solid coatings of ice develop as changing weather melt and ice over the snow, locking in the reindeers' main winter sustenance, moss. Goavvi is a result of planetary warming, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Polar region than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they hauled containers of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to distribute manually. These animals surrounded round us, pawing the frozen ground in vain for mossy morsels. This costly and laborious process is having a severe effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the choice is death. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are succumbing—some from lack of food, others submerging after falling into lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the art is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

The installation also underscores the clear difference between the modern interpretation of power as a commodity to be harnessed for gain and existence and the Sámi philosophy of life force as an inherent essence in animals, people, and the environment. This venue's history as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be exemplars for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of windfarms, hydroelectric dams, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their human rights, livelihoods, and traditions are threatened. "It's hard being such a tiny group to stand your ground when the reasons are grounded in global sustainability," Sara observes. "Extractivism has appropriated the language of ecology, but still it's just striving to find better ways to continue habits of consumption."

Individual Conflicts

She and her relatives have personally clashed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent rules on animal husbandry. Previously, Sara's brother initiated a sequence of unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a multi-year set of creations named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a colossal screen of numerous animal bones, which was exhibited at the the event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the national institution, where it hangs in the entryway.

Art as Activism

Among the community, art seems the sole sphere in which they can be understood by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|