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Visitors to the renowned gallery are familiar to unexpected experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've basked under an simulated sun, slid down spiral slides, and witnessed automated sea creatures floating through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be immersing themselves in the detailed nasal chambers of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this huge space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a labyrinthine design modeled after the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Once inside, they can meander around or unwind on skins, listening on headphones to tribal seniors imparting stories and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why the nose? It might appear quirky, but the artwork pays tribute to a obscure biological feat: experts have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the surrounding air it takes in by eighty degrees, enabling the creature to thrive in harsh Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "produces a perception of smallness that you as a individual are not in control over nature." She is a ex- journalist, children's author, and land defender, who comes from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that creates the chance to alter your viewpoint or trigger some humility," she continues.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The labyrinthine installation is one of several features in Sara's immersive commission showcasing the culture, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi count about 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They have experienced oppression, forced assimilation, and suppression of their language by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the work also highlights the community's challenges relating to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and external control.

Symbolism in Components

On the lengthy access ramp, there's a looming, 26-metre formation of skins entangled by electrical wires. It represents a analogy for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this section of the artwork, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein dense sheets of ice develop as changing temperatures thaw and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' primary cold-season sustenance, moss. Goavvi is a consequence of climate change, which is happening up to four times faster in the Far North than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a icy season and joined Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they transported carts of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to provide manually. The herd surrounded round us, scratching the frozen ground in futility for mossy pieces. This expensive and demanding process is having a significant effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. But the other option is malnutrition. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—some from lack of food, others suffocating after plunging into lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the installation is a tribute to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Perspectives

This artwork also emphasizes the stark contrast between the western understanding of power as a commodity to be utilized for gain and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of energy as an innate power in animals, people, and the environment. The gallery's history as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as eco-imperialism by Nordic countries. In their efforts to be standard bearers for clean sources, these states have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, river barriers, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, livelihoods, and traditions are threatened. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to defend yourself when the arguments are based on environmental protection," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the language of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to maintain practices of expenditure."

Personal Challenges

She and her family have personally clashed with the state authorities over its increasingly stringent policies on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's brother initiated a set of finally failed lawsuits over the forced culling of his herd, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a multi-year collection of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal screen of four hundred animal bones, which was displayed at the the show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it is displayed in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, visual expression appears the sole sphere in which they can be understood by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|