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Attendees to the renowned gallery are familiar to unexpected displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They've basked under an artificial sun, descended down amusement rides, and observed robotic jellyfish drifting through the air. But this marks the first time they will be immersing themselves in the detailed nose passages of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this huge space—created by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a labyrinthine construction inspired by the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Once inside, they can stroll around or relax on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to Sámi elders sharing tales and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It might sound whimsical, but the artwork celebrates a little-known natural marvel: researchers have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it takes in by eighty degrees, enabling the animal to thrive in harsh Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara notes, "produces a perception of smallness that you as a individual are not superior over nature." The artist is a ex- writer, children's author, and rights advocate, who hails from a herding family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that fosters the possibility to change your outlook or trigger some modesty," she states.

A Tribute to Traditional Ways

The maze-like design is one of several features in Sara's immersive art project celebrating the culture, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They've endured discrimination, cultural suppression, and suppression of their tongue by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the work also spotlights the people's issues relating to the environmental emergency, property rights, and imperialism.

Meaning in Elements

On the extended access slope, there's a looming, 26-meter sculpture of skins trapped by electrical wires. It can be read as a symbol for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part heavenly staircase, this section of the artwork, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which solid coatings of ice develop as varying weather thaw and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary winter nourishment, moss. Goavvi is a outcome of planetary warming, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than in other regions.

A few years back, I met with Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they hauled containers of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to provide manually. The reindeer surrounded round us, scratching the icy ground in vain for lichen-covered pieces. This costly and labour-intensive process is having a severe effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. Yet the alternative is malnutrition. As goavvi winters become frequent, reindeer are dying—some from lack of food, others submerging after plunging into streams through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the art is a monument to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

This artwork also highlights the stark difference between the modern view of energy as a asset to be harnessed for gain and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an natural life force in animals, humans, and nature. 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. As they strive to be leaders for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of windfarms, river barriers, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their legal protections, ways of life, and culture are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to protect your rights when the reasons are grounded in global sustainability," Sara observes. "Mining practices has appropriated the discourse of environmentalism, but still it's just aiming to find alternative ways to persist in practices of expenditure."

Individual Challenges

She and her kin have personally conflicted with the Norwegian government over its tightening regulations on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's brother undertook a set of unsuccessful legal cases over the required reduction of his herd, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara produced a extended collection of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal drape of four hundred animal bones, which was displayed at the 2017 event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Activism

For many Sámi, art is the sole sphere in which they can be listened to by outsiders. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|