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Attendees to the renowned gallery are used to surprising encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an artificial sun, descended down spiral slides, and observed robotic jellyfish drifting through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nasal passages of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this huge space—developed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a winding construction modeled after the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Upon entering, they can wander around or chill out on skins, listening on headphones to tribal seniors telling stories and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

Why choose the nasal structure? It could appear quirky, but the installation pays tribute to a obscure scientific wonder: experts have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it takes in by 80°C, enabling the animal to survive in inhospitable Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "produces a feeling of smallness that you as a person are not dominant over nature." She is a ex- journalist, young adult author, and environmental activist, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Maybe that creates the chance to change your outlook or spark some humbleness," she adds.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The labyrinthine installation is part of a features in Sara's absorbing commission celebrating the traditions, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They have endured discrimination, integration policies, and eradication of their language by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the art also highlights the group's issues relating to the climate crisis, loss of territory, and external control.

Symbolism in Elements

Along the long entry ramp, there's a towering, 26-meter formation of skins ensnared by electrical wires. It serves as a metaphor for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this part of the artwork, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an harsh environmental condition, in which thick coatings of ice form as changing weather melt and ice over the snow, locking in the reindeers' key cold-season food, lichen. This phenomenon is a result of planetary warming, which is occurring up to four times faster in the Far North than in other regions.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and joined Sámi herders on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they transported carts of food pellets on to the exposed Arctic plains to provide manually. The reindeer crowded round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain attempts for vegetative bits. This expensive and labour-intensive process is having a severe impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. However the choice is death. As goavvi winters become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—some from hunger, others suffocating after plunging into lakes and rivers through prematurely melting ice. To some extent, the work is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

The sculpture also emphasizes the clear contrast between the industrial interpretation of electricity as a resource to be harnessed for gain and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of energy as an natural essence in creatures, humans, and land. This venue's past as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by Nordic countries. As they strive to be standard bearers for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries 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, livelihoods, and traditions are endangered. "It's challenging being such a limited population to stand your ground when the justifications are grounded in saving the world," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the discourse of ecology, but nonetheless it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to maintain patterns of consumption."

Individual Conflicts

She and her family have themselves disagreed with the national administration over its tightening regulations on animal husbandry. Previously, Sara's brother initiated a series of ultimately unsuccessful court actions over the required reduction of his livestock, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara produced a extended collection of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive curtain of 400 animal bones, which was shown at the the event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it resides in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, art appears the exclusive realm in which they can be understood by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|