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Visitors to the renowned gallery are familiar to unusual experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've basked under an simulated sun, descended down helter skelters, and witnessed AI-powered jellyfish hovering through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nasal cavities of a reindeer. The latest artistic project for this cavernous space—created by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a labyrinthine design modeled after the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose cavities. Once inside, they can wander around or relax on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to community leaders telling stories and insights.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why the nose? It may sound whimsical, but the exhibit celebrates a rarely recognized biological feat: researchers have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it takes in by eighty degrees, allowing the creature to survive in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "produces a sense of inferiority that you as a human being are not superior over nature." She is a ex- reporter, writer for kids, and environmental activist, who hails from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that fosters the possibility to change your perspective or evoke some modesty," she adds.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The winding installation is part of a features in Sara's engaging art project honoring the heritage, understanding, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They've endured oppression, cultural suppression, and suppression of their language by all four states. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the art also spotlights the people's struggles associated with the environmental emergency, property rights, and external control.

Metaphor in Elements

Along the extended entry incline, there's a soaring, 26-meter sculpture of reindeer hides entangled by utility lines. It represents a symbol for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this part of the installation, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an harsh environmental condition, whereby thick layers of ice develop as changing weather thaw and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' main cold-season food, fungus. The condition is a result of planetary warming, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Polar region than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a icy season and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they carried trailers of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to distribute manually. These animals surrounded round us, pawing the frozen ground in vain attempts for lichen-covered pieces. This resource-intensive and laborious method is having a severe impact on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. However the choice is malnutrition. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are dying—a number from starvation, others suffocating after falling into streams through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the art is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Opposing Perspectives

This artwork also underscores the clear difference between the modern understanding of energy as a commodity to be utilized for profit and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an inherent essence in animals, individuals, and land. This venue's legacy as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be exemplars for sustainable power, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the development of windfarms, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their fundamental freedoms, livelihoods, and way of life are at risk. "It's challenging being such a limited population to protect your rights when the reasons are rooted in saving the world," Sara comments. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the discourse of sustainability, but still it's just striving to find more suitable ways to maintain habits of expenditure."

Individual Struggles

Sara and her family have personally conflicted with the state authorities over its increasingly stringent policies on herding. A few years ago, Sara's sibling undertook a set of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his animals, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara developed a multi-year set of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a colossal curtain of numerous cranial remains, which was shown at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the public gallery, where it hangs in the lobby.

The Role of Art in Activism

For many Sámi, visual expression seems the exclusive sphere in which they can be understood by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|