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Visitors to the renowned gallery are used to unusual experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an artificial sun, descended down amusement rides, and witnessed automated jellyfish floating through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be immersing themselves in the complex nasal passages of a reindeer. The newest artistic project for this huge space—designed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a winding construction inspired by the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nasal passages. Inside, they can wander around or chill out on pelts, tuning in on headphones to Sámi elders imparting narratives and insights.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It might sound playful, but the exhibit pays tribute to a obscure scientific wonder: researchers have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it takes in by eighty degrees, enabling the animal to endure in harsh Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "creates a sense of smallness that you as a person are not superior over nature." Sara is a former writer, children's author, and rights advocate, who hails from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Possibly that generates the potential to alter your perspective or evoke some humbleness," she continues.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The maze-like installation is part of a components in Sara's engaging exhibition honoring the traditions, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They have endured oppression, cultural suppression, and repression of their language by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the installation also highlights the community's struggles connected to the environmental emergency, property rights, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Elements

Along the long entrance slope, there's a towering, eighty-five-foot structure of skins trapped by power and light cables. It can be read as a analogy for the political and economic systems restricting the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this part of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an severe climatic event, in which dense layers of ice form as changing temperatures melt and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' key cold-season nourishment, moss. The condition is a consequence of climate change, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Far North than elsewhere.

Previously, I met with Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they hauled carts of supplementary feed on to the barren frozen landscape to provide through labor. These animals gathered round us, scratching the slippery ground in vain for mossy morsels. This expensive and labour-intensive process is having a drastic influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. Yet the alternative is starvation. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are dying—some from lack of food, others submerging after falling into streams through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the installation is a monument to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Perspectives

The installation also emphasizes the stark contrast between the industrial understanding of energy as a asset to be harnessed for gain and existence and the Sámi outlook of life force as an inherent life force in creatures, individuals, and the environment. This venue's past as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be exemplars for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of windfarms, water power facilities, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their legal protections, incomes, and traditions are endangered. "It's hard being such a tiny group to protect your rights when the justifications are grounded in global sustainability," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the rhetoric of ecology, but yet it's just striving to find better ways to continue habits of expenditure."

Individual Challenges

Sara and her family have themselves disagreed with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter rules on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's brother embarked on a series of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the required reduction of his livestock, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara created a multi-year series of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi including a massive drape of 400 cranial remains, which was exhibited at the 2017 event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Activism

For many Sámi, art seems the exclusive realm in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|