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Attendees to the renowned gallery are used to unusual displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an artificial sun, slid down amusement rides, and witnessed AI-powered jellyfish floating through the air. However this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nasal chambers of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this cavernous space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a winding construction modeled after the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nose passages. Once inside, they can stroll around or chill out on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to tribal seniors telling stories and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It could sound playful, but the artwork celebrates a little-known biological feat: experts have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it inhales by 80°C, helping the creature to endure in extreme Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "produces a sense of inferiority that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." She is a former reporter, children's author, and environmental activist, who hails from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that generates the potential to alter your perspective or evoke some modesty," she states.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The labyrinthine structure is part of a components in Sara's immersive art project showcasing the culture, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They've faced persecution, cultural suppression, and eradication of their tongue by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the installation also spotlights the community's issues associated with the global warming, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Materials

Along the long entrance slope, there's a towering, 26-meter structure of pelts trapped by utility lines. It serves as a analogy for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this part of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, in which thick coatings of ice form as varying weather thaw and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' key winter nourishment, fungus. Goavvi is a result of global heating, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Far North than globally.

A few years back, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a icy season and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they transported trailers of animal nutrition on to the exposed frozen landscape to provide through labor. The herd surrounded round us, digging the frozen ground in vain attempts for mossy bits. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive procedure is having a significant impact on herding practices—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the other option is starvation. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are dying—some from starvation, others submerging after falling into water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the work is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Perspectives

The sculpture also highlights the clear difference between the industrial interpretation of energy as a commodity to be exploited for profit and existence and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an natural power in creatures, humans, and the environment. This venue's past 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, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, river barriers, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi argue their legal protections, ways of life, and traditions are endangered. "It's hard being such a small minority to stand your ground when the arguments are rooted in saving the world," Sara comments. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the discourse of ecology, but still it's just striving to find more suitable ways to persist in patterns of use."

Personal Challenges

Sara and her kin have themselves clashed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent regulations on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's brother embarked on a sequence of finally failed court actions over the forced culling of his livestock, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara produced a multi-year set of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal curtain of numerous reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later purchased by the public gallery, where it resides in the lobby.

Art as Awareness

For many Sámi, visual expression seems the exclusive realm in which they can be understood by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|