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Guests to the renowned gallery are familiar to surprising encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have basked under an man-made sun, slid down helter skelters, and observed AI-powered sea creatures hovering through the air. But this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nose passages of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this cavernous space—designed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a winding design modeled after the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Once inside, they can wander around or chill out on pelts, tuning in on headphones to community leaders sharing stories and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It may sound playful, but the installation pays tribute to a obscure biological feat: experts have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the ambient air it inhales by eighty degrees, enabling the creature to endure in extreme Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "produces a feeling of smallness that you as a person are not in control over nature." Sara is a ex- journalist, children's author, and environmental activist, who hails from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Maybe that creates the potential to change your perspective or evoke some humility," she continues.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The labyrinthine installation is among various components in Sara's immersive exhibition showcasing the heritage, knowledge, and philosophy of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count about 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They've experienced discrimination, cultural suppression, and eradication of their dialect by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the work also highlights the group's challenges relating to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and external control.

Symbolism in Elements

At the lengthy entry ramp, there's a towering, 26-metre formation of pelts entangled by electrical wires. It can be read as a analogy for the political and economic systems restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this section of the installation, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, wherein dense sheets of ice develop as varying conditions thaw and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' key cold-season nourishment, lichen. Goavvi is a outcome of planetary warming, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they hauled carts of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to distribute manually. The herd crowded round us, pawing the frozen ground in vain attempts for mossy bits. This costly and labour-intensive process is having a drastic impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. But the other option is death. As these icy periods become routine, reindeer are perishing—some from hunger, others drowning after plunging into lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the installation is a tribute to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

This artwork also highlights the stark difference between the industrial understanding of energy as a resource to be exploited for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an inherent life force in creatures, humans, and land. This venue's legacy as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider eco-imperialism by Nordic countries. In their efforts to be leaders for sustainable power, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, water power facilities, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their human rights, incomes, and traditions are at risk. "It's hard being such a small minority to defend yourself when the arguments are rooted in environmental protection," Sara notes. "Mining practices has co-opted the discourse of sustainability, but yet it's just aiming to find alternative ways to persist in patterns of expenditure."

Personal Struggles

She and her relatives have personally conflicted with the state authorities over its increasingly stringent rules on herding. In 2016, Sara's brother undertook a sequence of finally failed legal cases over the forced culling of his herd, apparently to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara developed a four-year set of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge screen of numerous reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the public gallery, where it resides in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

For many Sámi, creative work is the exclusive sphere in which they can be understood by outsiders. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|