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Visitors to the renowned gallery are used to unusual experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an artificial sun, slid down spiral slides, and observed automated sea creatures floating through the air. But this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nose passages of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this immense space—developed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages patrons into a winding structure based on the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Once inside, they can wander around or unwind on pelts, listening on headphones to community leaders imparting narratives and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It could seem whimsical, but the installation celebrates a obscure biological feat: experts have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the ambient air it inhales by 80°C, enabling the creature to endure in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "generates a perception of inferiority that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." She is a ex- writer, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that creates the chance to alter your perspective or trigger some modesty," she states.

An Homage to Indigenous Heritage

The labyrinthine design is part of a features in Sara's immersive exhibition honoring the culture, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count about 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They have faced oppression, cultural suppression, and suppression of their dialect by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the art also highlights the group's issues connected to the climate crisis, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Meaning in Elements

At the extended access slope, there's a towering, 26-metre formation of skins trapped by power and light cables. It serves as a analogy for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this component of the installation, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, in which dense coatings of ice form as fluctuating temperatures melt and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' primary winter sustenance, moss. The condition is a consequence of planetary warming, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than globally.

Previously, I met with Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and joined Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they hauled trailers of food pellets on to the exposed Arctic plains to distribute through labor. The herd gathered round us, scratching the frozen ground in futility for vegetative pieces. This expensive and labour-intensive procedure is having a severe effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. However the choice is death. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are dying—some from hunger, others drowning after sinking in streams through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the installation is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Perspectives

This artwork also emphasizes the sharp difference between the industrial understanding of electricity as a asset to be harnessed for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi outlook of energy as an natural essence in creatures, people, and nature. This venue's history as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by Nordic countries. In their efforts to be leaders for renewable energy, Nordic nations have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of wind energy projects, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi argue their legal protections, incomes, and way of life are endangered. "It's challenging being such a limited population to stand your ground when the reasons are based on environmental protection," Sara comments. "Mining practices has co-opted the discourse of sustainability, but still it's just striving to find alternative ways to continue habits of consumption."

Individual Conflicts

Sara and her relatives have personally conflicted with the state authorities over its increasingly stringent policies on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's sibling undertook a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the required reduction of his animals, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara produced a extended set of creations named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive screen of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was shown at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it is displayed in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

Among the community, creative work seems the sole sphere in which they can be heard by people of other nations. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|