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Visitors to the renowned gallery are used to unexpected experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They have basked under an man-made sun, descended down spiral slides, and observed automated sea creatures floating through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nose cavities of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this immense space—created by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a winding structure based on the expanded interior of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Inside, they can meander around or relax on pelts, listening on headphones to community leaders sharing narratives and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It could seem whimsical, but the installation pays tribute to a rarely recognized biological feat: scientists have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it inhales by eighty degrees, enabling the creature to survive in extreme Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara explains, "creates a sense of smallness that you as a person are not in control over nature." Sara is a former reporter, young adult author, and environmental activist, who is from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Maybe that generates the chance to shift your viewpoint or evoke some humbleness," she adds.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The maze-like installation is part of a features in Sara's absorbing art project celebrating the culture, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi count about 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They have faced persecution, forced assimilation, and suppression of their dialect by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the work also draws attention to the group's challenges relating to the climate crisis, property rights, and external control.

Metaphor in Elements

Along the lengthy entry incline, there's a towering, 26-metre formation of skins entangled by electrical wires. It represents a analogy for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this part of the installation, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, wherein dense coatings of ice develop as changing temperatures liquefy and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' key winter sustenance, moss. Goavvi is a consequence of global heating, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than elsewhere.

A few years back, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they hauled containers of food pellets on to the barren tundra to provide by hand. The reindeer crowded round us, pawing the slippery ground in futility for vegetative bits. This costly and labour-intensive procedure is having a severe effect on herding practices—and on the animals' natural survival. However the other option is death. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—a number from hunger, others drowning after sinking in water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. In a sense, the art is a monument to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

The installation also highlights the sharp difference between the western interpretation of power as a resource to be harnessed for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi outlook of life force as an inherent power in animals, people, and the environment. This venue's legacy as a coal and oil power station is connected to this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by Nordic countries. As they strive to be exemplars for renewable energy, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the construction of windfarms, river barriers, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their human rights, incomes, and culture are endangered. "It's hard being such a limited population to defend yourself when the reasons are rooted in global sustainability," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the discourse of environmentalism, but yet it's just aiming to find better ways to continue habits of use."

Personal Conflicts

The artist and her kin have themselves disagreed with the state authorities over its tightening rules on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's brother embarked on a set of finally failed legal cases over the forced culling of his livestock, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara created a multi-year set of creations named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive curtain of numerous cranial remains, which was displayed at the 2017 event Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the entrance.

The Role of Art in Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, art is the sole sphere in which they can be understood by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|