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Visitors to the renowned gallery are used to unusual encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They've basked under an artificial sun, glided down spiral slides, and observed automated sea creatures floating through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be immersing themselves in the complex nose passages of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this immense space—created by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a labyrinthine structure inspired by the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nasal airways. Once inside, they can wander around or chill out on reindeer hides, tuning in on earphones to tribal seniors telling narratives and knowledge.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It could seem playful, but the artwork honors a little-known natural marvel: scientists have discovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it inhales by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the creature to thrive in harsh Arctic climates. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "generates a feeling of inferiority that you as a individual are not superior over nature." The artist is a ex- journalist, children's author, and land defender, who comes from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that generates the possibility to change your perspective or spark some humbleness," she adds.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The labyrinthine structure is one of several components in Sara's engaging art project showcasing the culture, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total about 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They have experienced oppression, integration policies, and suppression of their language by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the installation also spotlights the group's issues associated with the climate crisis, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Meaning in Components

On the extended access ramp, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot formation of reindeer hides ensnared by electrical wires. It serves as a symbol for the societal frameworks constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part heavenly staircase, this component of the artwork, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, in which dense coatings of ice form as varying temperatures thaw and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' main cold-season food, lichen. The condition is a consequence of climate change, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than globally.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi reindeer keepers on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they hauled trailers of food pellets on to the exposed tundra to provide manually. The reindeer gathered round us, pawing the icy ground in vain attempts for mossy pieces. This costly and demanding process is having a severe effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. Yet the choice is death. As these icy periods become frequent, reindeer are dying—a number from starvation, others drowning after plunging into lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the work is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Perspectives

This artwork also underscores the stark contrast between the industrial understanding of energy as a commodity to be exploited for gain and survival and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an innate essence in animals, people, and land. The gallery's legacy as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be exemplars for clean sources, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the development of windfarms, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and traditions are at risk. "It's hard being such a small minority to defend yourself when the justifications are grounded in global sustainability," Sara comments. "Mining practices has appropriated the language of ecology, but still it's just attempting to find alternative ways to continue habits of consumption."

Family Struggles

Sara and her family have themselves clashed with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent rules on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's brother initiated a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara produced a four-year set of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge curtain of four hundred cranial remains, which was displayed at the the event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it is displayed in the entryway.

Art as Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, visual expression seems the only sphere in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|