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Attendees to the renowned gallery are used to surprising displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an simulated sun, slid down spiral slides, and observed robotic sea creatures drifting through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be immersing themselves in the detailed nasal cavities of a reindeer. The latest artistic project for this cavernous space—created by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a maze-like design modeled after the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Upon entering, they can stroll around or unwind on skins, tuning in on headphones to community leaders sharing narratives and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why choose the nasal structure? It could sound whimsical, but the artwork celebrates a obscure biological feat: scientists have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it takes in by 80°C, helping the creature to endure in extreme Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara notes, "generates a feeling of smallness that you as a person are not superior over nature." Sara is a former writer, young adult author, and rights advocate, who is from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that creates the chance to shift your perspective or evoke some humbleness," she adds.

A Celebration to Indigenous Heritage

The maze-like installation is part of a elements in Sara's engaging art project honoring the culture, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number roughly 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They have experienced persecution, integration policies, and eradication of their language by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the work also highlights the community's challenges associated with the climate crisis, land dispossession, and external control.

Symbolism in Elements

Along the long access slope, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot structure of reindeer hides ensnared by electrical wires. It serves as a metaphor for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this part of the exhibit, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, whereby dense layers of ice form as changing weather thaw and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' main winter sustenance, fungus. The condition is a result of global heating, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Arctic than globally.

A few years back, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a icy season and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they transported containers of food pellets on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to dispense manually. The reindeer crowded round us, scratching the icy ground in vain attempts for vegetative morsels. This expensive and laborious procedure is having a drastic effect on herding practices—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the choice is death. As goavvi winters become frequent, reindeer are dying—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. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Perspectives

The sculpture also underscores the clear divergence between the modern understanding of energy as a asset to be exploited for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of life force as an inherent power in creatures, humans, and nature. The gallery's legacy as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by Nordic countries. In their efforts to be exemplars for clean sources, Nordic nations have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, river barriers, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi assert their legal protections, livelihoods, and way of life are endangered. "It's hard being such a small minority to stand your ground when the reasons are grounded in environmental protection," Sara notes. "Mining practices has appropriated the discourse of sustainability, but yet it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to continue habits of use."

Individual Conflicts

The artist and her kin have personally clashed with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter regulations on herding. A few years ago, Sara's sibling undertook a series of unsuccessful legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a four-year set of creations called Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal drape of four hundred cranial remains, which was exhibited at the 2017 event Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work appears the only realm in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|