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Visitors to the renowned gallery are used to unexpected experiences in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an simulated sun, glided down helter skelters, and seen robotic sea creatures floating through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nose passages of a reindeer. The newest artistic project for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a maze-like design based on the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Inside, they can wander around or chill out on skins, listening on earphones to tribal seniors imparting stories and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It may sound quirky, but the installation pays tribute to a little-known scientific wonder: scientists have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the ambient air it takes in by eighty degrees, allowing the animal to survive in harsh Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "creates a feeling of insignificance that you as a human being are not superior over nature." She is a ex- reporter, writer for kids, and environmental activist, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that creates the possibility to change your perspective or spark some humility," she adds.

A Celebration to Indigenous Heritage

The winding design is among various features in Sara's engaging commission showcasing the traditions, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They've endured discrimination, cultural suppression, and repression of their dialect by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the work also highlights the community's issues relating to the climate crisis, property rights, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Components

On the extended access ramp, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot sculpture of skins ensnared by electrical wires. It represents a symbol for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this component of the installation, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi word for an harsh environmental condition, wherein solid coatings of ice appear as changing conditions liquefy and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' main winter nourishment, lichen. Goavvi is a result of planetary warming, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than globally.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi herders on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they transported containers of food pellets on to the exposed tundra to dispense manually. The reindeer surrounded round us, pawing the slippery ground in futility for vegetative pieces. This costly and laborious process is having a severe effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. However the alternative is malnutrition. As these icy periods become routine, reindeer are dying—a number from lack of food, others drowning after sinking in water bodies through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the work is a monument to them. "With the layering of materials, in a way I'm introducing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Perspectives

The installation also emphasizes the sharp contrast between the industrial view of power as a resource to be utilized for profit and existence and the Sámi philosophy of life force as an innate essence in animals, humans, and nature. This venue's history as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by regional governments. As they strive to be leaders for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of windfarms, water power facilities, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and way of life are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to stand your ground when the reasons are rooted in environmental protection," Sara observes. "Extractivism has adopted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just attempting to find better ways to persist in habits of use."

Personal Struggles

She and her kin have personally disagreed with the state authorities over its tightening policies on reindeer management. A few years ago, Sara's brother embarked on a series of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the forced culling of his herd, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara created a four-year set of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal screen of four hundred animal bones, which was displayed at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it is displayed in the entrance.

The Role of Art in Activism

Among the community, art appears the only domain in which they can be listened to by the global community. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|