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Visitors to the renowned gallery are accustomed to unusual displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have basked under an artificial sun, slid down helter skelters, and witnessed automated jellyfish floating through the air. Yet this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the detailed nasal passages of a reindeer. The latest artistic project for this immense space—designed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a winding structure inspired by the expanded interior of a reindeer's nasal airways. Once inside, they can stroll around or relax on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to community leaders imparting stories and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why the nose? It might appear quirky, but the artwork celebrates a obscure natural marvel: experts have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the creature to thrive in harsh Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "produces a perception of smallness that you as a person are not superior over nature." Sara is a former writer, young adult author, and land defender, who comes from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that fosters the chance to alter your perspective or evoke some modesty," she adds.

A Tribute to Indigenous Heritage

The labyrinthine structure is one of several features in Sara's absorbing commission celebrating the heritage, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi total about 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They've experienced oppression, cultural suppression, and suppression of their dialect by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the work also highlights the people's struggles connected to the global warming, property rights, and external control.

Meaning in Materials

On the extended entry slope, there's a soaring, 26-meter formation of reindeer hides ensnared by power and light cables. It serves as a metaphor for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this section of the installation, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby dense layers of ice appear as fluctuating weather thaw and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary cold-season sustenance, fungus. Goavvi is a result of climate change, which is happening up to four times faster in the Arctic than globally.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in a remote town during a icy season and joined Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they carried containers of food pellets on to the barren tundra to dispense by hand. The herd crowded round us, pawing the frozen ground in vain for vegetative morsels. This costly and demanding process is having a significant effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. However the alternative is starvation. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are perishing—some from starvation, others submerging after plunging into water bodies through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the art is a monument to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Perspectives

The installation also highlights the clear divergence between the industrial view of electricity as a commodity to be utilized for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi philosophy of life force as an inherent life force in creatures, individuals, and land. The gallery's history as a fossil fuel plant is linked with this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be exemplars for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, hydroelectric dams, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and way of life are at risk. "It's hard being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the reasons are based on saving the world," Sara observes. "Extractivism has adopted the rhetoric of sustainability, but still it's just attempting to find better ways to continue habits of expenditure."

Family Struggles

She and her family have personally clashed with the national administration over its ever-stricter rules on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's sibling initiated a sequence of finally failed lawsuits over the forced culling of his livestock, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara produced a multi-year set of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge screen of 400 cranial remains, which was shown at the the show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it is displayed in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Activism

For many Sámi, art appears the only domain in which they can be heard by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|