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Guests to the renowned gallery are used to unusual experiences in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've basked under an man-made sun, descended down helter skelters, and witnessed automated jellyfish hovering through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the complex nose cavities of a reindeer. The current artist commission for this immense space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages patrons into a maze-like design based on the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Inside, they can wander around or chill out on pelts, listening on headphones to Sámi elders sharing narratives and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It could sound quirky, but the artwork pays tribute to a little-known scientific wonder: researchers have uncovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it inhales by eighty degrees, enabling the creature to survive in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "generates a perception of insignificance that you as a individual are not in control over nature." She is a ex- writer, children's author, and environmental activist, who comes from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that creates the possibility to alter your viewpoint or evoke some humbleness," she continues.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The winding installation is one of several features in Sara's immersive exhibition honoring the traditions, science, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They have faced oppression, forced assimilation, and eradication of their language by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the art also draws attention to the group's issues associated with the climate crisis, property rights, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Components

At the extended entrance ramp, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot formation of reindeer hides trapped by utility lines. It can be read as a analogy for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this part of the artwork, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby thick coatings of ice develop as varying weather melt and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' key winter nourishment, lichen. This phenomenon is a consequence of global heating, which is taking place up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than elsewhere.

A few years back, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they transported trailers of supplementary feed on to the exposed tundra to dispense manually. These animals surrounded round us, scratching the slippery ground in vain for vegetative morsels. This resource-intensive and demanding procedure is having a significant impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. Yet the other option is malnutrition. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are perishing—some from lack of food, others submerging after plunging into streams through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the installation is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

This artwork also emphasizes the stark divergence between the industrial understanding of energy as a resource to be exploited for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of energy as an innate power in animals, humans, and land. The gallery's past as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by regional governments. In their efforts to be leaders for clean sources, these states have locked horns with the Sámi over the development of windfarms, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi argue their human rights, livelihoods, and culture are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the justifications are based on saving the world," Sara comments. "Extractivism has appropriated the discourse of sustainability, but still it's just attempting to find better ways to maintain habits of expenditure."

Family Challenges

The artist and her kin have themselves conflicted with the state authorities over its tightening rules on animal husbandry. Previously, Sara's sibling embarked on a series of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the forced culling of his livestock, apparently to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a four-year collection of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi including a massive drape of 400 cranial remains, which was exhibited at the the event Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it hangs in the entrance.

Art as Advocacy

Among the community, art appears the sole domain in which they can be heard by outsiders. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|