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Attendees to the renowned gallery are accustomed to unusual encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an artificial sun, glided down spiral slides, and seen automated jellyfish floating through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nasal chambers of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this huge space—created by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a winding design based on the expanded interior of a reindeer's nasal airways. Once inside, they can wander around or chill out on skins, tuning in on headphones to Sámi elders telling tales and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

Why choose the nasal structure? It may seem whimsical, but the artwork pays tribute to a rarely recognized scientific wonder: scientists have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it inhales by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the creature to survive in inhospitable Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "produces a perception of smallness that you as a person are not in control over nature." Sara is a former journalist, children's author, and land defender, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that fosters the possibility to change your outlook or spark some humbleness," she states.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The maze-like design is one of several features in Sara's immersive art project showcasing the heritage, science, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They've endured persecution, forced assimilation, and eradication of their dialect by all four states. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the art also highlights the group's challenges connected to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and external control.

Symbolism in Elements

Along the lengthy entrance incline, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot sculpture of skins ensnared by electrical wires. It represents a analogy for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part heavenly staircase, this part of the exhibit, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby solid sheets of ice appear as varying weather thaw and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' main winter nourishment, fungus. The condition is a outcome of global heating, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Polar region than elsewhere.

A few years back, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they hauled containers of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to dispense by hand. These animals gathered round us, digging the frozen ground in vain attempts for mossy morsels. This expensive and laborious process is having a significant impact on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. However the other option is malnutrition. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are dying—a number from starvation, others drowning after falling into lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the work is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

The sculpture also underscores the clear difference between the western interpretation of electricity as a commodity to be harnessed for gain and existence and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an innate life force in creatures, individuals, and land. This venue's legacy as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider eco-imperialism by regional governments. As they strive to be standard bearers for sustainable power, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their traditional territory; the Sámi contend their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and traditions are threatened. "It's challenging being such a small minority to defend yourself when the arguments are grounded in global sustainability," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the rhetoric of ecology, but yet it's just aiming to find alternative ways to maintain practices of expenditure."

Personal Struggles

The artist and her relatives have personally disagreed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent regulations on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's brother embarked on a series of finally failed legal cases over the forced culling of his livestock, apparently to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara developed a extended series of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive drape of 400 animal bones, which was displayed at the the show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the entryway.

Art as Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, art is the exclusive realm in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|