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Attendees to the renowned gallery are familiar to unexpected displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've basked under an artificial sun, descended down spiral slides, and seen AI-powered sea creatures drifting through the air. However this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nasal chambers of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this cavernous space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a maze-like construction inspired by the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose cavities. Upon entering, they can meander around or relax on skins, tuning in on earphones to tribal seniors sharing stories and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why choose the nasal structure? It could sound playful, but the installation honors a obscure natural marvel: researchers have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the ambient air it breathes in by eighty degrees, helping the animal to endure in harsh Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "generates a perception of inferiority that you as a individual are not superior over nature." She is a former journalist, young adult author, and environmental activist, who is from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Possibly that creates the chance to change your perspective or trigger some humbleness," she states.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The winding installation is part of a features in Sara's absorbing exhibition celebrating the heritage, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They've endured discrimination, forced assimilation, and repression of their tongue by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the installation also highlights the community's struggles associated with the climate crisis, property rights, and external control.

Metaphor in Components

At the long entry ramp, there's a soaring, 26-meter structure of reindeer hides entangled by electrical wires. It represents a metaphor for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this component of the artwork, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, whereby dense coatings of ice develop as changing weather melt and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' key winter sustenance, lichen. The condition is a consequence of global heating, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than globally.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and joined Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they hauled trailers of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured tundra to distribute through labor. The herd crowded round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain for vegetative morsels. This costly and demanding procedure is having a severe influence on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. Yet the choice is malnutrition. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—some from hunger, others drowning after sinking in lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the work is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

This artwork also underscores the sharp divergence between the western understanding of energy as a asset to be exploited for gain and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an inherent essence in animals, people, and land. The gallery's past as a coal and oil power station is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be exemplars for clean sources, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of windfarms, water power facilities, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their human rights, ways of life, and culture are endangered. "It's challenging being such a limited population to defend yourself when the arguments are based on saving the world," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has adopted the rhetoric of sustainability, but nonetheless it's just striving to find more suitable ways to maintain patterns of expenditure."

Family Struggles

Sara and her kin have personally disagreed with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent policies on animal husbandry. Previously, Sara's brother initiated a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful court actions over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a four-year set of creations called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge curtain of 400 animal bones, which was shown at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it hangs in the entrance.

Art as Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, art is the only realm in which they can be understood by the global community. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|