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Guests to the renowned gallery are familiar to surprising experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an man-made sun, glided down amusement rides, and observed AI-powered sea creatures drifting through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nasal passages of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this cavernous space—designed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a maze-like structure modeled after the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Once inside, they can meander around or relax on pelts, tuning in on earphones to community leaders sharing stories and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It could appear playful, but the installation honors a little-known scientific wonder: experts have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it takes in by 80°C, allowing the creature to endure in extreme Arctic conditions. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara explains, "generates a perception of inferiority that you as a person are not in control over nature." Sara is a ex- journalist, writer for kids, and land defender, who is from a herding family in northern Norway. "Maybe that generates the potential to alter your perspective or trigger some humbleness," she adds.

A Celebration to Indigenous Heritage

The winding design is among various components in Sara's absorbing commission honoring the culture, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi count about 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They have faced oppression, integration policies, and repression of their tongue by all four states. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the work also highlights the people's issues connected to the climate crisis, property rights, and external control.

Meaning in Materials

On the long entry incline, there's a soaring, 26-metre formation of pelts trapped by electrical wires. It serves as a metaphor for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Part pylon, part spiritual ascent, this component of the installation, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which solid coatings of ice develop as changing conditions melt and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' main winter food, moss. This phenomenon is a result of global heating, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Polar region than in other regions.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they carried carts of animal nutrition on to the barren frozen landscape to distribute through labor. These animals surrounded round us, pawing the frozen ground in futility for lichen-covered bits. This resource-intensive and laborious method is having a severe effect on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. Yet the choice is malnutrition. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—a number from lack of food, others submerging after sinking in streams through prematurely melting ice. To some extent, the art is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

This artwork also highlights the clear divergence between the industrial interpretation of electricity as a asset to be harnessed for economic benefit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of energy as an innate life force in creatures, individuals, and the environment. The gallery's legacy as a coal and oil power station is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by Nordic countries. In their efforts to be exemplars for renewable energy, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, river barriers, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their legal protections, ways of life, and culture are at risk. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to protect your rights when the arguments are rooted in global sustainability," Sara notes. "Extractivism has adopted the discourse of sustainability, but yet it's just striving to find alternative ways to persist in patterns of consumption."

Personal Conflicts

The artist and her kin have personally conflicted with the state authorities over its ever-stricter policies on animal husbandry. Previously, Sara's brother undertook a series of ultimately unsuccessful court actions over the forced culling of his animals, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a four-year set of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi including a massive curtain of four hundred reindeer skulls, 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 Advocacy

Among the community, creative work is the only domain in which they can be understood by outsiders. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|