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Attendees to the renowned gallery are familiar to surprising encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've basked under an simulated sun, descended down helter skelters, and observed AI-powered sea creatures drifting through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nose cavities of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this huge space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a maze-like structure modeled after the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nasal passages. Once inside, they can stroll around or unwind on reindeer hides, tuning in on earphones to tribal seniors sharing tales and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It could seem whimsical, but the installation pays tribute to a little-known scientific wonder: experts have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it takes in by 80°C, allowing the animal to survive in extreme Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "generates a feeling of insignificance that you as a individual are not in control over nature." Sara is a ex- writer, young adult author, and land defender, who comes from a herding family in northern Norway. "Maybe that fosters the potential to shift your outlook or evoke some modesty," she continues.

A Tribute to Indigenous Heritage

The maze-like installation is part of a features in Sara's immersive commission honoring the culture, science, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They have endured discrimination, cultural suppression, and suppression of their dialect by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi belief system and founding narrative, the installation also spotlights the group's struggles connected to the climate crisis, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Meaning in Components

On the lengthy entry incline, there's a looming, 26-metre sculpture of reindeer hides entangled by utility lines. It can be read as a analogy for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this section of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein dense coatings of ice appear as fluctuating conditions melt and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' key winter food, fungus. The condition is a consequence of climate change, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than in other regions.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they hauled carts of food pellets on to the exposed tundra to provide through labor. The reindeer gathered round us, pawing the icy ground in futility for vegetative pieces. This costly and laborious procedure is having a severe impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the alternative is starvation. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—some from hunger, others drowning after sinking in lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the art is a monument to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

This artwork also underscores the sharp difference between the modern view of power as a asset to be exploited for gain and survival and the Sámi philosophy of life force as an inherent essence in animals, people, and land. The gallery's history as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be standard bearers for sustainable power, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, river barriers, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their human rights, livelihoods, and way of life are endangered. "It's challenging being such a small minority to defend yourself when the arguments are based on saving the world," Sara notes. "Extractivism has appropriated the discourse of ecology, but still it's just attempting to find better ways to continue patterns of consumption."

Family Challenges

She and her relatives have themselves disagreed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent rules on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's sibling initiated a series of finally failed legal cases over the required reduction of his livestock, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara created a four-year series of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal curtain of 400 cranial remains, which was shown at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it is displayed in the entryway.

Art as Awareness

Among the community, creative work appears the only sphere in which they can be heard by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|