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Visitors to the renowned gallery are used to unexpected encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an simulated sun, slid down spiral slides, and witnessed AI-powered jellyfish floating through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nose cavities of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this cavernous space—developed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes patrons into a maze-like design inspired by the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nasal passages. Inside, they can meander around or unwind on pelts, tuning in on headphones to Sámi elders telling stories and insights.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It could sound quirky, but the installation pays tribute to a rarely recognized scientific wonder: scientists have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it inhales by eighty degrees, allowing the creature to survive in inhospitable Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara notes, "produces a feeling of inferiority that you as a person are not superior over nature." She is a former journalist, writer for kids, and environmental activist, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Maybe that fosters the chance to change your perspective or spark some humbleness," she states.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The maze-like structure is one of several features in Sara's immersive exhibition showcasing the traditions, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi count about 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They have experienced oppression, forced assimilation, and eradication of their dialect by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the work also highlights the group's issues relating to the climate crisis, land dispossession, and external control.

Meaning in Materials

On the long entry incline, there's a soaring, 26-metre structure of pelts entangled by utility lines. It can be read as a analogy for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part heavenly staircase, this component of the exhibit, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby dense layers of ice appear as changing temperatures melt and ice over the snow, locking in the reindeers' key cold-season sustenance, fungus. The condition is a outcome of climate change, which is taking place up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they carried carts of food pellets on to the exposed tundra to dispense by hand. The herd crowded round us, scratching the frozen ground in vain attempts for vegetative morsels. This resource-intensive and laborious process is having a severe impact on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. However the other option is starvation. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—a number from hunger, others suffocating after plunging into lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the art is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm introducing the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

This artwork also highlights the sharp contrast between the industrial view of power as a commodity to be utilized for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi outlook of energy as an innate life force in animals, individuals, and the environment. This venue's legacy as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by regional governments. In their efforts to be leaders for sustainable power, these states have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, river barriers, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and culture are endangered. "It's hard being such a tiny group to stand your ground when the reasons are rooted in environmental protection," Sara comments. "Mining practices has adopted the discourse of ecology, but still it's just aiming to find better ways to persist in practices of consumption."

Personal Conflicts

She and her family have personally disagreed with the national administration over its tightening rules on herding. Previously, Sara's brother initiated a sequence of unsuccessful legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a extended collection of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive curtain of 400 cranial remains, which was shown at the the show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it is displayed in the entryway.

The Role of Art in Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, visual expression is the only sphere in which they can be understood by the global community. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|