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Visitors to the renowned gallery are used to surprising displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an artificial sun, glided down spiral slides, and observed AI-powered jellyfish drifting through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nose chambers of a reindeer. The latest artistic project for this huge space—designed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a labyrinthine design modeled after the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose cavities. Upon entering, they can meander around or chill out on skins, listening on earphones to tribal seniors telling stories and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It might seem whimsical, but the installation pays tribute to a little-known scientific wonder: researchers have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it takes in by 80°C, enabling the animal to thrive in harsh Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "creates a sense of smallness that you as a human being are not in control over nature." The artist is a ex- journalist, writer for kids, and land defender, who is from a herding family in northern Norway. "Possibly that generates the possibility to shift your viewpoint or evoke some humility," she continues.

An Homage to Indigenous Heritage

The maze-like design is part of a features in Sara's immersive art project celebrating the culture, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They have faced oppression, cultural suppression, and eradication of their dialect by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi belief system and founding narrative, the installation also spotlights the group's issues associated with the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and external control.

Symbolism in Components

Along the lengthy access incline, there's a towering, 26-metre structure of skins entangled by power and light cables. It serves as a analogy for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this part of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, in which dense sheets of ice appear as changing temperatures liquefy and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary cold-season nourishment, moss. The condition is a outcome of planetary warming, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Polar region than in other regions.

A few years back, I met with Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they transported containers of supplementary feed on to the exposed Arctic plains to dispense through labor. The reindeer crowded round us, scratching the frozen ground in futility for lichen-covered pieces. This costly and labour-intensive procedure is having a severe influence on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the other option is starvation. As these icy periods become routine, reindeer are succumbing—a number from starvation, others drowning after plunging into streams through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the installation is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of elements, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

The sculpture also underscores the sharp divergence between the western understanding of energy as a asset to be exploited for profit and survival and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an inherent life force in creatures, humans, and land. The gallery's history as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be exemplars for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and traditions are threatened. "It's challenging being such a limited population to protect your rights when the justifications are based on saving the world," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the discourse of ecology, but still it's just attempting to find better ways to persist in practices of use."

Personal Conflicts

She and her family have personally disagreed with the national administration over its tightening regulations on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's sibling initiated a sequence of finally failed lawsuits over the forced culling of his herd, supposedly to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara developed a multi-year series of creations called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive screen of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was shown at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the lobby.

Creative Expression as Activism

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