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Guests to the renowned gallery are used to surprising experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They have basked under an simulated sun, glided down helter skelters, and seen robotic sea creatures hovering through the air. However this marks the first time they will be venturing themselves in the complex nose passages of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this cavernous space—created by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes patrons into a winding design based on the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Upon entering, they can wander around or unwind on pelts, listening on earphones to Sámi elders telling stories and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It may seem playful, but the installation honors a little-known natural marvel: experts have discovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it breathes in by 80°C, helping the animal to thrive in harsh Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "generates a feeling of smallness that you as a person are not in control over nature." Sara is a former reporter, writer for kids, and land defender, who hails from a herding family in northern Norway. "Possibly that fosters the chance to alter your outlook or spark some humbleness," she continues.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The labyrinthine design is among various features in Sara's absorbing art project celebrating the traditions, understanding, and philosophy of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They have endured persecution, cultural suppression, and eradication of their language by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the art also draws attention to the community's challenges relating to the global warming, land dispossession, and external control.

Symbolism in Materials

At the lengthy entry ramp, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot structure of pelts ensnared by power and light cables. It can be read as a symbol for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this section of the artwork, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby solid sheets of ice develop as changing conditions liquefy and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' main winter food, lichen. The condition is a consequence of planetary warming, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than in other regions.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and joined Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they carried trailers of supplementary feed on to the barren Arctic plains to distribute by hand. The reindeer gathered round us, pawing the icy ground in futility for mossy pieces. This costly and demanding procedure is having a significant effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. Yet the other option is starvation. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are dying—some from starvation, others submerging after falling into streams through prematurely melting ice. To some extent, the installation is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of elements, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

This artwork also emphasizes the clear divergence between the industrial view of energy as a resource to be exploited for profit and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an natural essence in animals, individuals, and land. The gallery's past as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi consider eco-imperialism by regional governments. In their efforts to be leaders for sustainable power, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the construction of windfarms, river barriers, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi assert their human rights, livelihoods, and traditions are threatened. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to protect your rights when the arguments are based on global sustainability," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the language of sustainability, but yet it's just attempting to find alternative ways to persist in habits of consumption."

Personal Struggles

The artist and her relatives have themselves clashed with the state authorities over its increasingly stringent policies on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's brother initiated a sequence of unsuccessful lawsuits over the forced culling of his herd, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara created a extended collection of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge screen of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Activism

Among the community, visual expression is the sole sphere in which they can be understood by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|