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Guests to the renowned gallery are accustomed to unusual encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an simulated sun, descended down amusement rides, and observed AI-powered sea creatures floating through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nasal cavities of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this huge space—developed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a labyrinthine construction inspired by the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Inside, they can wander around or chill out on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to Sámi elders sharing tales and knowledge.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It might seem whimsical, but the artwork honors a rarely recognized natural marvel: researchers have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the ambient air it inhales by 80°C, enabling the animal to survive in extreme Arctic climates. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "generates a sense of smallness that you as a person are not dominant over nature." Sara is a ex- writer, writer for kids, and environmental activist, who hails from a herding family in northern Norway. "Maybe that creates the chance to alter your viewpoint or trigger some humbleness," she adds.

A Tribute to Traditional Ways

The winding structure is among various components in Sara's engaging commission celebrating the culture, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Partially migratory, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They have endured persecution, integration policies, and repression of their tongue by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the work also spotlights the people's struggles associated with the climate crisis, property rights, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Components

At the long entrance slope, there's a soaring, 26-metre structure of skins entangled by power and light cables. It represents a analogy for the societal frameworks restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this section of the exhibit, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, wherein dense sheets of ice appear as changing weather thaw and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' key cold-season food, lichen. This phenomenon is a outcome of planetary warming, which is happening up to four times faster in the Arctic than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I met with Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and joined Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they hauled containers of supplementary feed on to the exposed tundra to distribute through labor. These animals crowded round us, scratching the frozen ground in futility for vegetative morsels. This costly and laborious process is having a significant impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. But the choice is malnutrition. As these icy periods become routine, reindeer are dying—a number from starvation, others suffocating after plunging into streams through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the art is a monument to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Perspectives

This artwork also underscores the sharp divergence between the modern interpretation of power as a resource to be utilized for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of energy as an innate essence in creatures, humans, and the environment. This venue's history as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as eco-imperialism by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be standard bearers for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have clashed with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, river barriers, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi argue their legal protections, incomes, and culture are endangered. "It's challenging being such a limited population to defend yourself when the justifications are based on saving the world," Sara notes. "Mining practices has co-opted the discourse of ecology, but still it's just aiming to find alternative ways to persist in practices of expenditure."

Family Struggles

The artist and her relatives have personally conflicted with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter policies on herding. In 2016, Sara's brother embarked on a sequence of unsuccessful legal cases over the required reduction of his herd, supposedly to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara created a multi-year set of creations called Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge drape of 400 reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the the show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it hangs in the entrance.

The Role of Art in Advocacy

Among the community, visual expression appears the only domain in which they can be understood by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|