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Attendees to the renowned gallery are familiar to unusual experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've basked under an simulated sun, slid down helter skelters, and observed automated jellyfish floating through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nose chambers of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a maze-like construction based on the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nasal airways. Inside, they can wander around or unwind on skins, listening on headphones to community leaders telling narratives and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why choose the nasal structure? It may seem playful, but the installation celebrates a rarely recognized scientific wonder: experts have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it inhales by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the animal to endure in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "creates a perception of smallness that you as a human being are not superior over nature." She is a former writer, young adult author, and land defender, who is from a pastoral family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that creates the potential to change your perspective or evoke some modesty," she continues.

A Tribute to Traditional Ways

The maze-like installation is among various elements in Sara's absorbing art project celebrating the heritage, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They've experienced discrimination, cultural suppression, and eradication of their dialect by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the work also spotlights the people's challenges relating to the climate crisis, property rights, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Components

At the lengthy access ramp, there's a soaring, 26-meter formation of pelts entangled by power and light cables. It can be read as a metaphor for the societal frameworks restricting the Sámi. Part pylon, part heavenly staircase, this section of the artwork, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby dense coatings of ice appear as fluctuating weather liquefy and ice over the snow, locking in the reindeers' key winter sustenance, moss. Goavvi is a outcome of global heating, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than globally.

A few years back, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and went with Sámi herders on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they carried trailers of supplementary feed on to the barren tundra to provide through labor. The herd crowded round us, pawing the frozen ground in vain attempts for lichen-covered morsels. This expensive and demanding method is having a significant impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the alternative is starvation. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—a number from lack of food, others drowning after falling into water bodies through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the work is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

The sculpture also highlights the clear difference between the modern understanding of electricity as a resource to be exploited for gain and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of life force as an inherent power in animals, individuals, and nature. The gallery's legacy as a coal and oil power station is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be standard bearers for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, hydroelectric dams, and mines on their traditional territory; the Sámi contend their human rights, ways of life, and way of life are threatened. "It's challenging being such a small minority to protect your rights when the justifications are based on global sustainability," Sara notes. "Mining practices has appropriated the rhetoric of sustainability, but yet it's just striving to find more suitable ways to continue practices of expenditure."

Personal Challenges

She and her family have personally conflicted with the national administration over its increasingly stringent regulations on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's sibling undertook a sequence of unsuccessful legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara produced a extended set of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi including a huge drape of four hundred animal bones, which was shown at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the lobby.

Art as Awareness

Among the community, creative work is the only sphere in which they can be heard by the global community. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|