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Visitors to the renowned gallery are familiar to unexpected experiences in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an man-made sun, descended down spiral slides, and observed automated sea creatures floating through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be venturing themselves in the complex nasal passages of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this immense space—developed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a winding construction inspired by the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nasal passages. Upon entering, they can wander around or relax on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to Sámi elders telling stories and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

Why choose the nasal structure? It could sound playful, but the artwork honors a obscure natural marvel: scientists have found that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it takes in by 80°C, allowing the creature to endure in harsh Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara notes, "produces a feeling of smallness that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." The artist is a ex- journalist, young adult author, and environmental activist, who comes from a pastoral family in northern Norway. "Possibly that fosters the potential to alter your perspective or spark some modesty," she adds.

A Celebration to Indigenous Heritage

The maze-like structure is one of several components in Sara's absorbing art project honoring the culture, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi number roughly 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They've experienced discrimination, integration policies, and suppression of their language by all four countries. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the installation also highlights the people's issues connected to the climate crisis, property rights, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Elements

Along the extended entrance ramp, there's a towering, 26-meter structure of pelts trapped by utility lines. It can be read as a symbol for the societal frameworks constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this component of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, whereby dense coatings of ice develop as changing temperatures melt and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' key cold-season sustenance, moss. This phenomenon is a consequence of climate change, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than globally.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi herders on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they carried trailers of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured tundra to distribute manually. The reindeer surrounded round us, pawing the icy ground in vain attempts for lichen-covered bits. This expensive and demanding method is having a severe influence on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. However the choice is starvation. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—some from hunger, others suffocating after falling into lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the installation is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

The sculpture also highlights the stark divergence between the western view of power as a resource to be utilized for profit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an innate power in animals, individuals, and land. The gallery's past as a coal and oil power station is connected to this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by Nordic countries. As they strive to be standard bearers for renewable energy, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi assert their human rights, ways of life, and culture are at risk. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to stand your ground when the reasons are grounded in global sustainability," Sara observes. "Mining practices has co-opted the rhetoric of sustainability, but yet it's just striving to find more suitable ways to maintain practices of consumption."

Individual Struggles

The artist and her kin have themselves clashed with the state authorities over its tightening policies on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's brother initiated a sequence of finally failed legal cases over the required reduction of his herd, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara developed a extended series of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi including a huge drape of 400 reindeer skulls, which was shown at the the show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it is displayed in the lobby.

Creative Expression as Activism

For many Sámi, visual expression is the only sphere in which they can be heard by outsiders. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|