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Attendees to the renowned gallery are familiar to unexpected encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an simulated sun, descended down amusement rides, and seen automated sea creatures drifting through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nasal passages of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this huge space—created by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a winding construction modeled after the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nose passages. Inside, they can meander around or unwind on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to Sámi elders sharing narratives and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

Why choose the nasal structure? It may sound whimsical, but the artwork honors a obscure natural marvel: researchers have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it breathes in by 80 degrees celsius, helping the animal to thrive in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "creates a perception of inferiority that you as a person are not in control over nature." Sara is a ex- writer, young adult author, and environmental activist, who comes from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that fosters the potential to alter your perspective or trigger some humbleness," she continues.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The winding structure is among various components in Sara's immersive commission celebrating the traditions, knowledge, and philosophy of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Partially migratory, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They've faced discrimination, forced assimilation, and repression of their language by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the art also highlights the people's challenges relating to the climate crisis, property rights, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Components

At the long entry slope, there's a looming, 26-meter structure of reindeer hides trapped by electrical wires. It can be read as a symbol for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this part of the exhibit, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein solid sheets of ice form as changing conditions thaw and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' main cold-season sustenance, moss. The condition is a consequence of planetary warming, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than globally.

Previously, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they transported carts of food pellets on to the exposed frozen landscape to provide by hand. These animals surrounded round us, pawing the icy ground in vain for lichen-covered morsels. This resource-intensive and laborious procedure is having a significant impact on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the choice is malnutrition. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—a number from starvation, others suffocating after plunging into lakes and rivers through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the installation is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of elements, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

The sculpture also emphasizes the clear contrast between the western interpretation of energy as a asset to be exploited for gain and survival and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an innate essence in animals, individuals, and nature. This venue's history as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by Nordic countries. As they strive to be leaders for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have clashed with the Sámi over the development of wind energy projects, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their human rights, livelihoods, and traditions are endangered. "It's challenging being such a limited population to stand your ground when the justifications are based on environmental protection," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the language of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just striving to find better ways to persist in habits of expenditure."

Personal Struggles

The artist and her kin have personally conflicted with the national administration over its increasingly stringent regulations on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's brother undertook a set of unsuccessful legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, supposedly to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara produced a multi-year collection of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi including a huge curtain of numerous reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later purchased by the national institution, where it is displayed in the lobby.

Art as Advocacy

Among the community, art appears the only realm in which they can be listened to by outsiders. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|