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Attendees to the renowned gallery are familiar to unusual encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an simulated sun, descended down helter skelters, and observed robotic sea creatures floating through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nose cavities of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this huge space—created by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a labyrinthine structure inspired by the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Upon entering, they can wander around or unwind on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to tribal seniors telling stories and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

Why choose the nasal structure? It might sound playful, but the installation celebrates a rarely recognized natural marvel: scientists have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it breathes in by 80 degrees celsius, helping the animal to endure in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "generates a feeling of smallness that you as a person are not superior over nature." The artist is a former journalist, young adult author, and environmental activist, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that generates the chance to shift your outlook or evoke some modesty," she states.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The labyrinthine installation is one of several components in Sara's absorbing exhibition honoring the culture, science, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Partially migratory, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They have faced discrimination, cultural suppression, and suppression of their dialect by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the installation also highlights the people's challenges relating to the climate crisis, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Components

Along the extended entry incline, there's a towering, eighty-five-foot structure of pelts ensnared by power and light cables. It represents a symbol for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this part of the artwork, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, whereby solid layers of ice develop as varying conditions thaw and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' main cold-season sustenance, moss. The condition is a outcome of planetary warming, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Arctic than elsewhere.

Previously, I met with Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and joined Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they carried carts of supplementary feed on to the barren Arctic plains to dispense manually. The reindeer crowded round us, scratching the frozen ground in vain attempts for lichen-covered morsels. This expensive and laborious process is having a severe influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' natural survival. However the alternative is death. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—some from hunger, others suffocating after sinking in lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the art is a memorial to them. "With the layering of elements, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

The sculpture also emphasizes the stark contrast between the modern understanding of power as a resource to be harnessed for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi outlook of energy as an natural life force in animals, humans, and land. The gallery's past as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by Nordic countries. As they strive to be leaders for sustainable power, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the development of windfarms, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and culture are threatened. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to protect your rights when the justifications are grounded in environmental protection," Sara comments. "Extractivism has co-opted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find alternative ways to continue practices of consumption."

Family Struggles

Sara and her relatives have themselves disagreed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent rules on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's brother initiated a series of finally failed lawsuits over the required reduction of his herd, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a extended series of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi including a massive screen of numerous cranial remains, which was exhibited at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the public gallery, where it is displayed in the entryway.

Art as Awareness

For many Sámi, art is the exclusive sphere in which they can be understood by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|