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Guests to the renowned gallery are familiar to unexpected displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They've basked under an man-made sun, glided down helter skelters, and seen robotic jellyfish floating through the air. But this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nasal cavities of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this huge space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages patrons into a labyrinthine construction modeled after the expanded inside of a reindeer's nasal airways. Once inside, they can wander around or relax on skins, tuning in on earphones to community leaders imparting tales and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It may appear playful, but the artwork pays tribute to a rarely recognized natural marvel: experts have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the ambient air it takes in by eighty degrees, helping the creature to endure in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "produces a perception of smallness that you as a individual are not in control over nature." She is a former journalist, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Maybe that generates the possibility to change your viewpoint or evoke some modesty," she adds.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The winding design is one of several components in Sara's immersive art project celebrating the heritage, knowledge, and philosophy of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total about 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They've endured oppression, forced assimilation, and repression of their tongue by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the installation also draws attention to the people's issues relating to the global warming, loss of territory, and external control.

Metaphor in Components

On the long entrance slope, there's a looming, 26-metre formation of skins ensnared by power and light cables. It serves as a metaphor for the societal frameworks constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this part of the exhibit, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein thick layers of ice form as fluctuating weather liquefy and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' main cold-season sustenance, lichen. The condition is a outcome of climate change, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Far North than globally.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in a remote town during a icy season and went with Sámi herders on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they carried trailers of food pellets on to the exposed Arctic plains to distribute manually. The reindeer surrounded round us, pawing the slippery ground in futility for lichen-covered bits. This resource-intensive and demanding procedure is having a severe effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. However the other option is death. As these icy periods become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—a number from lack of food, others suffocating after plunging into streams through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the installation is a monument to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm introducing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Perspectives

The installation also highlights the clear divergence between the western view of energy as a resource to be harnessed for gain and survival and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an natural power in creatures, humans, and the environment. The gallery's past as a coal and oil power station is connected to this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be leaders for clean sources, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of windfarms, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their human rights, incomes, and culture are at risk. "It's challenging being such a limited population to stand your ground when the reasons are based on saving the world," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the rhetoric of ecology, but nonetheless it's just attempting to find alternative ways to persist in patterns of expenditure."

Individual Struggles

Sara and her relatives have themselves clashed with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent policies on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's sibling embarked on a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the forced culling of his herd, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a extended series of creations called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive drape of numerous reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it hangs in the entryway.

The Role of Art in Advocacy

For many Sámi, art appears the exclusive sphere in which they can be heard by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|