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Visitors to the renowned gallery are familiar to unexpected experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an simulated sun, slid down spiral slides, and witnessed automated jellyfish hovering through the air. However this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nasal chambers of a reindeer. The current artist commission for this huge space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a winding design modeled after the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Inside, they can wander around or chill out on pelts, tuning in on earphones to Sámi elders telling narratives and insights.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why choose the nasal structure? It could sound whimsical, but the artwork pays tribute to a rarely recognized scientific wonder: researchers have discovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it inhales by 80°C, helping the creature to endure in harsh Arctic conditions. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "generates a perception of insignificance that you as a individual are not superior over nature." The artist is a former writer, young adult author, and environmental activist, who is from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that generates the possibility to alter your outlook or evoke some humbleness," she continues.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The winding installation is part of a components in Sara's engaging commission celebrating the heritage, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count about 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They have endured persecution, integration policies, and repression of their dialect by all four states. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi belief system and founding narrative, the art also spotlights the people's struggles connected to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Materials

At the long entrance slope, there's a looming, 26-metre formation of reindeer hides entangled by power and light cables. It represents a analogy for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part spiritual ascent, this section of the exhibit, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an harsh environmental condition, in which thick layers of ice develop as varying temperatures thaw and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary winter nourishment, lichen. The condition is a outcome of planetary warming, which is taking place up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than in other regions.

A few years back, I met with Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they transported containers of food pellets on to the barren Arctic plains to dispense by hand. The reindeer surrounded round us, scratching the frozen ground in futility for vegetative pieces. This costly and demanding procedure is having a significant effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the choice is death. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—a number from starvation, others drowning after sinking in streams through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the work is a memorial to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

The installation also emphasizes the stark contrast between the western understanding of energy as a asset to be utilized for profit and existence and the Sámi worldview of life force as an natural power in animals, humans, and the environment. The gallery's history as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be exemplars for sustainable power, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, livelihoods, and traditions are threatened. "It's challenging being such a limited population to defend yourself when the arguments are based on environmental protection," Sara notes. "Extractivism has adopted the discourse of sustainability, but yet it's just attempting to find alternative ways to persist in patterns of expenditure."

Personal Challenges

The artist and her relatives have personally clashed with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter rules on herding. In 2016, Sara's brother initiated a series of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the required reduction of his livestock, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a extended set of creations named Pile O'Sápmi including a huge screen of 400 animal bones, which was shown at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the entrance.

The Role of Art in Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work seems the sole realm in which they can be heard by the global community. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|