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Visitors to the renowned gallery are accustomed to unexpected encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've basked under an artificial sun, glided down helter skelters, and observed AI-powered jellyfish hovering through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nasal chambers of a reindeer. The newest artistic project for this immense space—created by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages patrons into a maze-like design inspired by the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Upon entering, they can stroll around or unwind on pelts, listening on headphones to community leaders imparting tales and knowledge.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why choose the nasal structure? It might sound quirky, but the installation pays tribute to a obscure scientific wonder: researchers have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it takes in by eighty degrees, helping the creature to thrive in harsh Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "creates a feeling of inferiority that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." The artist is a ex- journalist, young adult author, and land defender, who comes from a herding family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that fosters the possibility to alter your outlook or trigger some modesty," she adds.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The winding design is part of a components in Sara's engaging commission honoring the traditions, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count about 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They've experienced oppression, cultural suppression, and repression of their dialect by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the installation also spotlights the group's struggles associated with the climate crisis, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Materials

Along the extended entrance ramp, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot sculpture of skins entangled by electrical wires. It can be read as a symbol for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this part of the exhibit, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein solid coatings of ice appear as fluctuating weather thaw and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' primary cold-season nourishment, lichen. This phenomenon is a result of climate change, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Far North than globally.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a severe cold period and joined Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they carried containers of food pellets on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to dispense by hand. The reindeer gathered round us, digging the slippery ground in vain attempts for vegetative pieces. This expensive and laborious process is having a significant impact on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the alternative is malnutrition. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are dying—some from starvation, others drowning after plunging into lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the installation is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

The installation also emphasizes the stark divergence between the modern understanding of energy as a commodity to be exploited for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an natural life force in animals, humans, and nature. This venue's legacy as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by Nordic countries. While attempting to be leaders for clean sources, Nordic nations have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of windfarms, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their legal protections, livelihoods, and way of life are threatened. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to protect your rights when the arguments are grounded in saving the world," Sara observes. "Mining practices has co-opted the language of sustainability, but nonetheless it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to maintain practices of consumption."

Individual Struggles

Sara and her family have themselves conflicted with the national administration over its increasingly stringent regulations on herding. A few years ago, Sara's brother initiated a sequence of finally failed lawsuits over the required reduction of his herd, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a four-year collection of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive screen of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the the show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the lobby.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

Among the community, art seems the exclusive sphere in which they can be understood by outsiders. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|