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Attendees to the renowned gallery are familiar to surprising displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an artificial sun, descended down spiral slides, and witnessed automated jellyfish floating through the air. Yet this marks the first time they will be venturing themselves in the intricate nasal chambers of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this immense space—created by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages patrons into a maze-like design based on the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nasal airways. Inside, they can meander around or unwind on skins, listening on headphones to Sámi elders imparting stories and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It might appear quirky, but the installation celebrates a rarely recognized natural marvel: researchers have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the creature to thrive in extreme Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara explains, "creates a feeling of insignificance that you as a human being are not superior over nature." Sara is a former reporter, young adult author, and environmental activist, who comes from a herding family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that creates the potential to change your perspective or evoke some humbleness," she continues.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The labyrinthine installation is part of a components in Sara's engaging exhibition showcasing the traditions, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They have endured discrimination, cultural suppression, and suppression of their tongue by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the installation also spotlights the group's challenges relating to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Components

Along the long entrance ramp, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot sculpture of skins entangled by electrical wires. It represents a symbol for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this component of the artwork, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which thick sheets of ice appear as varying temperatures melt and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' main cold-season sustenance, lichen. Goavvi is a outcome of global heating, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than elsewhere.

A few years back, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi herders on their motorized sleds in freezing temperatures as they hauled containers of food pellets on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to provide through labor. These animals crowded round us, pawing the frozen ground in vain for lichen-covered bits. This costly and demanding procedure is having a drastic impact on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. Yet the choice is death. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are dying—a number from hunger, others submerging after sinking in streams through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the art is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm introducing the condition to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

The installation also highlights the clear divergence between the industrial interpretation of energy as a commodity to be harnessed for profit and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of energy as an innate life force in creatures, individuals, and nature. This venue's past as a coal and oil power station is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as eco-imperialism by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be leaders for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, water power facilities, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their human rights, ways of life, and way of life are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a limited population to defend yourself when the arguments are rooted in saving the world," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the language of sustainability, but still it's just striving to find alternative ways to persist in habits of consumption."

Individual Challenges

The artist and her kin have themselves clashed with the Norwegian government over its tightening rules on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's sibling undertook a series of unsuccessful legal cases over the forced culling of his herd, apparently to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara developed a extended set of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi including a huge curtain of 400 reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it hangs in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Activism

For many Sámi, visual expression appears the exclusive domain in which they can be listened to by outsiders. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|