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Visitors to the renowned gallery are familiar to surprising displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an simulated sun, glided down helter skelters, and observed robotic sea creatures hovering through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nose cavities of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this immense space—created by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a maze-like design modeled after the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Upon entering, they can stroll around or unwind on skins, tuning in on earphones to community leaders sharing tales and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It may appear whimsical, but the artwork pays tribute to a rarely recognized biological feat: experts have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it inhales by 80°C, allowing the animal to thrive in harsh Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "produces a sense of smallness that you as a individual are not superior over nature." Sara is a former journalist, writer for kids, and land defender, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that generates the potential to alter your outlook or trigger some modesty," she states.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The labyrinthine design is among various components in Sara's engaging art project showcasing the culture, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They have endured discrimination, forced assimilation, and eradication of their tongue by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the art also highlights the community's challenges connected to the climate crisis, property rights, and external control.

Meaning in Elements

At the lengthy entrance incline, there's a soaring, 26-meter structure of skins ensnared by utility lines. It can be read as a symbol for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this component of the artwork, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, whereby dense sheets of ice develop as changing conditions thaw and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary winter food, moss. This phenomenon is a result of planetary warming, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than in other regions.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and went with Sámi reindeer keepers on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they carried carts of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to distribute through labor. These animals gathered round us, digging the frozen ground in vain for vegetative bits. This resource-intensive and laborious procedure is having a drastic influence on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. However the other option is malnutrition. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—a number from starvation, others suffocating after plunging into water bodies through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the installation is a monument to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Perspectives

This artwork also emphasizes the stark difference between the western understanding of electricity as a resource to be harnessed for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an inherent power in animals, individuals, and the environment. The gallery's history as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be leaders for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have clashed with the Sámi over the construction of windfarms, river barriers, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and traditions are at risk. "It's very difficult being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the reasons are grounded in saving the world," Sara notes. "Mining practices has appropriated the rhetoric of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find better ways to continue practices of expenditure."

Personal Challenges

She and her family have themselves clashed with the national administration over its tightening rules on herding. Previously, Sara's sibling undertook a series of ultimately unsuccessful court actions over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara produced a multi-year collection of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi including a massive curtain of numerous animal bones, which was shown at the the event Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it is displayed in the entrance.

The Role of Art in Advocacy

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