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Guests to the renowned gallery are familiar to unexpected encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an artificial sun, slid down helter skelters, and seen robotic sea creatures hovering through the air. However this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nose passages of a reindeer. The newest artistic project for this huge space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a winding structure based on the expanded interior of a reindeer's nasal airways. Upon entering, they can stroll around or chill out on pelts, listening on headphones to Sámi elders sharing tales and knowledge.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why the nose? It may seem playful, but the artwork celebrates a rarely recognized scientific wonder: experts have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the ambient air it inhales by eighty degrees, helping the animal to endure in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "generates a feeling of insignificance that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." The artist is a ex- journalist, young adult author, and land defender, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Maybe that creates the possibility to alter your perspective or evoke some humility," she states.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The winding design is one of several features in Sara's engaging exhibition showcasing the culture, science, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They've faced oppression, integration policies, and suppression of their language by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the work also highlights the community's challenges relating to the global warming, land dispossession, and external control.

Symbolism in Components

At the extended access incline, there's a looming, 26-metre structure of reindeer hides trapped by utility lines. It serves as a analogy for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this component of the exhibit, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which solid sheets of ice develop as varying temperatures thaw and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary winter nourishment, lichen. The condition is a consequence of climate change, which is happening up to four times faster in the Far North than in other regions.

Previously, I traveled to see Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and joined Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they carried trailers of supplementary feed on to the barren Arctic plains to dispense manually. The herd crowded round us, digging the frozen ground in vain for mossy morsels. This costly and labour-intensive process is having a significant effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. However the other option is starvation. As these icy periods become routine, reindeer are succumbing—a number from hunger, others suffocating after plunging into lakes and rivers through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the installation is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm bringing the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

This artwork also underscores the clear difference between the western view of power as a asset to be exploited for profit and existence and the Sámi philosophy of life force as an innate essence in creatures, people, and the environment. The gallery's history as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be standard bearers for clean sources, Nordic nations have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of windfarms, water power facilities, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and traditions are threatened. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to defend yourself when the justifications are based on saving the world," Sara comments. "Mining practices has adopted the rhetoric of ecology, but still it's just striving to find better ways to continue patterns of use."

Individual Conflicts

She and her family have personally disagreed with the state authorities over its ever-stricter policies on herding. Previously, Sara's brother initiated a set of unsuccessful legal cases over the required reduction of his animals, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a extended series of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal curtain of numerous cranial remains, which was displayed at the the show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it hangs in the entryway.

The Role of Art in Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, art is the sole realm in which they can be understood by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|