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Guests to the renowned gallery are used to unusual displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have basked under an simulated sun, descended down helter skelters, and observed automated jellyfish floating through the air. But this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nose chambers of a reindeer. The current artist commission for this cavernous space—created by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a maze-like design based on the expanded inside of a reindeer's nasal passages. Once inside, they can stroll around or chill out on skins, listening on headphones to tribal seniors sharing stories and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why the nose? It may appear quirky, but the exhibit celebrates a little-known natural marvel: scientists have found that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it breathes in by 80°C, helping the animal to thrive in harsh Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "generates a feeling of inferiority that you as a human being are not in control over nature." The artist is a former journalist, writer for kids, and environmental activist, who hails from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that fosters the potential to alter your perspective or trigger some humility," she continues.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The winding structure is one of several features in Sara's engaging exhibition showcasing the heritage, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They've endured persecution, integration policies, and repression of their tongue by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi belief system and founding narrative, the art also spotlights the group's struggles connected to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Components

Along the lengthy access ramp, there's a looming, 26-meter structure of skins trapped by electrical wires. It serves as a analogy for the political and economic systems restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this part of the exhibit, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, in which solid coatings of ice appear as changing weather liquefy and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' main cold-season sustenance, moss. Goavvi is a result of planetary warming, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than globally.

A few years back, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they transported containers of food pellets on to the barren tundra to provide by hand. The reindeer surrounded round us, digging the slippery ground in vain for vegetative bits. This costly and labour-intensive method is having a severe effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. However the choice is starvation. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are perishing—a number from lack of food, others suffocating after plunging into streams through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the work is a tribute to them. "With the layering of materials, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

The installation also underscores the stark difference between the industrial interpretation of electricity as a resource to be utilized for profit and existence and the Sámi outlook of life force as an innate life force in animals, individuals, and nature. This venue's legacy as a coal and oil power station is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as eco-imperialism by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be standard bearers for sustainable power, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, river barriers, and mines on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, livelihoods, and way of life are endangered. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to protect your rights when the justifications are grounded in environmental protection," Sara comments. "Extractivism has appropriated the language of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find alternative ways to persist in practices of consumption."

Personal Conflicts

The artist and her relatives have themselves clashed with the state authorities over its increasingly stringent rules on herding. A few years ago, Sara's sibling undertook a set of unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara developed a four-year set of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive curtain of numerous animal bones, which was shown at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it hangs in the entryway.

Art as Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, art seems the sole realm in which they can be listened to by outsiders. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|