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Guests to the renowned gallery are accustomed to unexpected experiences in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an simulated sun, descended down amusement rides, and seen automated sea creatures drifting through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this immense space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a maze-like design modeled after the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nose passages. Inside, they can meander around or unwind on skins, listening on earphones to tribal seniors imparting narratives and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It might seem quirky, but the installation celebrates a little-known scientific wonder: researchers have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the ambient air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, allowing the creature to survive in inhospitable Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "produces a perception of smallness that you as a person are not superior over nature." She is a former reporter, young adult author, and land defender, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that creates the possibility to alter your perspective or spark some humility," she adds.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The labyrinthine structure is part of a components in Sara's engaging exhibition honoring the heritage, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They've faced discrimination, forced assimilation, and suppression of their language by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the installation also spotlights the people's challenges associated with the climate crisis, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Meaning in Elements

Along the extended access ramp, there's a looming, 26-meter formation of pelts ensnared by power and light cables. It represents a analogy for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this part of the installation, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, whereby thick layers of ice develop as changing weather thaw and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' primary cold-season sustenance, fungus. The condition is a result of planetary warming, which is occurring up to four times faster in the Polar region than globally.

A few years back, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and accompanied Sámi herders on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they carried trailers of supplementary feed on to the exposed frozen landscape to distribute through labor. The herd gathered round us, pawing the icy ground in futility for mossy pieces. This resource-intensive and demanding method is having a significant effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the alternative is starvation. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are succumbing—a number from starvation, others drowning after falling into streams through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the art is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of elements, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

This artwork also emphasizes the stark divergence between the modern understanding of electricity as a asset to be harnessed for gain and survival and the Sámi worldview of life force as an inherent essence in creatures, humans, and land. This venue's history as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by regional governments. In their efforts to be standard bearers for clean sources, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their human rights, incomes, and traditions are at risk. "It's hard being such a limited population to stand your ground when the reasons are based on saving the world," Sara comments. "Mining practices has adopted the discourse of ecology, but still it's just striving to find better ways to persist in practices of consumption."

Family Challenges

The artist and her kin have themselves disagreed with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent rules on herding. A few years ago, Sara's sibling initiated a series of unsuccessful court actions over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a four-year set of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi including a massive curtain of numerous cranial remains, which was exhibited at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the lobby.

The Role of Art in Activism

Among the community, art appears the sole sphere in which they can be heard by the global community. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|