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Visitors to the renowned gallery are accustomed to surprising encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an simulated sun, slid down spiral slides, and seen robotic sea creatures drifting through the air. But this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nasal passages of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this huge space—created by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a labyrinthine construction inspired by the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nose cavities. Upon entering, they can stroll around or unwind on skins, listening on earphones to community leaders sharing stories and knowledge.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why the nose? It may seem whimsical, but the artwork celebrates a rarely recognized biological feat: researchers have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it inhales by eighty degrees, allowing the animal to endure in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "creates a perception of insignificance that you as a human being are not in control over nature." The artist is a ex- reporter, children's author, and rights advocate, who is from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that fosters the potential to shift your perspective or trigger some humbleness," she continues.

A Tribute to Traditional Ways

The maze-like installation is among various components in Sara's absorbing exhibition honoring the heritage, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi count about 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They've faced discrimination, cultural suppression, and repression of their tongue by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the work also spotlights the group's issues connected to the global warming, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Meaning in Components

On the long entrance incline, there's a looming, 26-metre formation of reindeer hides entangled by utility lines. It serves as a metaphor for the political and economic systems restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this part of the artwork, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which solid coatings of ice develop as changing weather liquefy and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' main winter sustenance, lichen. The condition is a result of planetary warming, which is happening up to four times faster in the Polar region than globally.

Three years ago, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and went with Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they carried containers of food pellets on to the barren Arctic plains to dispense by hand. The herd surrounded round us, digging the icy ground in vain attempts for mossy morsels. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive procedure is having a severe influence on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. But the alternative is death. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are perishing—some from starvation, others submerging after falling into streams through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the installation is a monument to them. "With the layering of elements, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

The installation also underscores the clear difference between the industrial interpretation of energy as a asset to be exploited for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi worldview of life force as an inherent life force in animals, individuals, and the environment. This venue's legacy as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as eco-imperialism by Nordic countries. As they strive to be leaders for sustainable power, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their traditional territory; the Sámi argue their legal protections, ways of life, and traditions are threatened. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to defend yourself when the justifications are grounded in saving the world," Sara comments. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the language of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just attempting to find better ways to maintain habits of use."

Individual Struggles

She and her kin have themselves conflicted with the national administration over its tightening regulations on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's sibling undertook a sequence of finally failed lawsuits over the required reduction of his livestock, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara produced a multi-year series of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a colossal curtain of four hundred animal bones, which was shown at the the event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it hangs in the lobby.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work appears the only sphere in which they can be understood by outsiders. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|