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Visitors to the renowned gallery are used to unusual encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an artificial sun, slid down spiral slides, and observed AI-powered sea creatures hovering through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nasal chambers of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this huge space—designed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a winding construction based on the expanded inside of a reindeer's nasal passages. Upon entering, they can wander around or unwind on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to community leaders imparting tales and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It might seem quirky, but the exhibit honors a obscure scientific wonder: researchers have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the ambient air it inhales by 80°C, helping the creature to survive in harsh Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "produces a sense of insignificance that you as a person are not superior over nature." Sara is a ex- reporter, writer for kids, and land defender, who comes from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that creates the potential to alter your outlook or evoke some humbleness," she adds.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The maze-like installation is part of a features in Sara's absorbing exhibition showcasing the heritage, knowledge, and philosophy of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They've faced persecution, cultural suppression, and eradication of their tongue by all four nations. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the installation also spotlights the people's struggles associated with the climate crisis, property rights, and colonialism.

Meaning in Components

At the lengthy access slope, there's a soaring, 26-metre structure of pelts ensnared by utility lines. It represents a metaphor for the societal frameworks restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this section of the artwork, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, wherein dense coatings of ice appear as changing temperatures melt and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' main cold-season sustenance, fungus. This phenomenon is a consequence of planetary warming, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Polar region than in other regions.

Previously, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they carried carts of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to dispense through labor. These animals gathered round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain attempts for vegetative bits. This costly and laborious process is having a severe influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. But the other option is death. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—a number from hunger, others submerging after falling into lakes and rivers through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the installation is a monument to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

The installation also highlights the sharp divergence between the industrial understanding of electricity as a resource to be exploited for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi philosophy of life force as an inherent power in creatures, individuals, and nature. The gallery's legacy as a coal and oil power station is connected to this, as is what the Sámi consider environmental exploitation by Nordic countries. While attempting to be standard bearers for renewable energy, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of windfarms, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and culture are endangered. "It's hard being such a small minority to defend yourself when the arguments are grounded in saving the world," Sara observes. "Mining practices has appropriated the language of ecology, but still it's just aiming to find alternative ways to persist in patterns of consumption."

Individual Challenges

Sara and her relatives have personally clashed with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter policies on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's brother initiated a series of finally failed lawsuits over the forced culling of his animals, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara created a multi-year set of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi including a massive curtain of 400 cranial remains, which was shown at the 2017 event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it resides in the entrance.

The Role of Art in Advocacy

Among the community, creative work seems the sole realm in which they can be understood by people of other nations. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|