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Attendees to the renowned gallery are accustomed to unusual encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've basked under an artificial sun, slid down helter skelters, and seen automated jellyfish drifting through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nose cavities of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this cavernous space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes patrons into a maze-like construction inspired by the expanded inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Once inside, they can stroll around or unwind on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to community leaders imparting tales and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

Why choose the nasal structure? It could seem playful, but the exhibit celebrates a rarely recognized scientific wonder: scientists have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the surrounding air it inhales by 80 degrees celsius, allowing the animal to endure in harsh Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara notes, "produces a feeling of insignificance that you as a human being are not superior over nature." Sara is a ex- journalist, children's author, and rights advocate, who is from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that generates the potential to alter your viewpoint or evoke some humbleness," she adds.

A Tribute to Traditional Ways

The maze-like installation is one of several components in Sara's immersive exhibition honoring the culture, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number about 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They've experienced oppression, cultural suppression, and repression of their dialect by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the work also highlights the people's issues relating to the climate crisis, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Meaning in Elements

On the extended entry incline, there's a towering, eighty-five-foot sculpture of reindeer hides ensnared by electrical wires. It represents a symbol for the political and economic systems restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part heavenly staircase, this component of the artwork, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, in which solid layers of ice appear as fluctuating conditions thaw and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' key cold-season sustenance, lichen. The condition is a outcome of planetary warming, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than elsewhere.

Previously, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they hauled trailers of food pellets on to the barren tundra to distribute through labor. The reindeer gathered round us, digging the icy ground in vain for vegetative bits. This expensive and labour-intensive procedure is having a significant impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. But the other option is starvation. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—a number from hunger, others suffocating after sinking in water bodies through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the installation is a monument to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

The installation also emphasizes the stark divergence between the modern interpretation of electricity as a resource to be harnessed for profit and existence and the Sámi worldview of energy as an inherent life force in animals, people, and land. The gallery's past as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be standard bearers for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have clashed with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, river barriers, and mines on their traditional territory; the Sámi argue their human rights, incomes, and culture are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to defend yourself when the reasons are grounded in environmental protection," Sara notes. "Extractivism has appropriated the rhetoric of sustainability, but still it's just attempting to find better ways to maintain practices of consumption."

Family Conflicts

Sara and her family have themselves clashed with the state authorities over its tightening rules on herding. Previously, Sara's brother embarked on a series of unsuccessful court actions over the required reduction of his herd, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara produced a four-year series of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi including a massive drape of four hundred animal bones, which was exhibited at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it resides in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Activism

For many Sámi, art seems the only sphere in which they can be heard by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|