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Guests to the renowned gallery are used to unusual displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an simulated sun, glided down amusement rides, and observed AI-powered jellyfish drifting through the air. However this marks the first time they will be venturing themselves in the complex nose passages of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this immense space—designed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a labyrinthine structure based on the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nasal passages. Inside, they can wander around or chill out on skins, tuning in on earphones to community leaders telling tales and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It may appear playful, but the installation pays tribute to a obscure scientific wonder: experts have found that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it inhales by eighty degrees, allowing the animal to survive in extreme Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "generates a feeling of smallness that you as a person are not in control over nature." Sara is a ex- journalist, children's author, and land defender, who is from a herding family in northern Norway. "Maybe that generates the possibility to alter your perspective or spark some modesty," she states.

A Tribute to Indigenous Heritage

The winding structure is among various features in Sara's absorbing art project showcasing the traditions, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number roughly 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They have experienced oppression, forced assimilation, and repression of their language by all four states. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the installation also highlights the group's challenges relating to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and colonialism.

Metaphor in Elements

At the long entrance incline, there's a towering, 26-metre sculpture of pelts trapped by power and light cables. It serves as a analogy for the political and economic systems restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this part of the artwork, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, whereby dense layers of ice appear as fluctuating conditions liquefy and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' primary winter sustenance, moss. This phenomenon is a outcome of global heating, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Polar region than in other regions.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi herders on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they transported carts of food pellets on to the exposed frozen landscape to provide manually. These animals gathered round us, scratching the frozen ground in vain for lichen-covered morsels. This resource-intensive and demanding method is having a drastic impact on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. However the other option is death. As these icy periods become routine, reindeer are perishing—a number from hunger, others drowning after sinking in streams through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the work is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

This artwork also emphasizes the clear divergence between the industrial understanding of power as a resource to be exploited for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an innate power in animals, people, and land. This venue's legacy as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by regional governments. As they strive to be exemplars for clean sources, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, river barriers, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their legal protections, ways of life, and culture are threatened. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to protect your rights when the reasons are rooted in saving the world," Sara comments. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the discourse of sustainability, but yet it's just striving to find alternative ways to continue patterns of use."

Personal Struggles

She and her kin have themselves conflicted with the state authorities over its tightening regulations on herding. In 2016, Sara's sibling initiated a set of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the required reduction of his livestock, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara produced a extended series of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a colossal drape of 400 reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it hangs in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

Among the community, creative work appears the only realm in which they can be understood by people of other nations. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|