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Visitors to the renowned gallery are familiar to surprising experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They have basked under an artificial sun, glided down helter skelters, and witnessed robotic jellyfish hovering through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the complex nose passages of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this cavernous space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes patrons into a winding construction based on the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose cavities. Upon entering, they can stroll around or chill out on skins, tuning in on headphones to Sámi elders imparting narratives and insights.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why choose the nasal structure? It might appear whimsical, but the exhibit honors a obscure natural marvel: experts have found that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the incoming air it breathes in by 80°C, enabling the animal to thrive in extreme Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "generates a feeling of inferiority that you as a person are not superior over nature." She is a ex- journalist, writer for kids, and environmental activist, who is from a pastoral family in northern Norway. "Maybe that creates the potential to alter your outlook or spark some modesty," she continues.

A Tribute to Traditional Ways

The winding design is one of several elements in Sara's engaging exhibition celebrating the traditions, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They've faced discrimination, forced assimilation, and eradication of their tongue by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi belief system and founding narrative, the work also draws attention to the people's struggles associated with the climate crisis, loss of territory, and external control.

Symbolism in Components

On the lengthy entry incline, there's a looming, 26-metre sculpture of pelts trapped by utility lines. It represents a symbol for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this component of the exhibit, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, whereby thick coatings of ice appear as fluctuating weather liquefy and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' key winter food, fungus. This phenomenon is a consequence of planetary warming, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Polar region than in other regions.

Previously, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a icy season and joined Sámi reindeer keepers on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they hauled trailers of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to distribute manually. The reindeer surrounded round us, digging the slippery ground in vain for mossy pieces. This costly and laborious process is having a severe impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the other option is malnutrition. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—some from hunger, others submerging after sinking in streams through unstable frozen surfaces. In a sense, the art is a memorial to them. "With the layering of elements, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

The sculpture also highlights the clear difference between the industrial view of electricity as a commodity to be utilized for gain and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of life force as an natural life force in animals, individuals, and the environment. The gallery's past as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by Nordic countries. As they strive to be leaders for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of windfarms, river barriers, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their legal protections, ways of life, and culture are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a tiny group to stand your ground when the justifications are rooted in global sustainability," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but yet it's just attempting to find better ways to maintain practices of use."

Family Struggles

She and her family have personally clashed with the Norwegian government over its increasingly stringent regulations on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's brother undertook a set of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the required reduction of his animals, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara produced a multi-year collection of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive curtain of four hundred animal bones, which was shown at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the public gallery, where it resides in the entrance.

The Role of Art in Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, visual expression is the only sphere in which they can be understood by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|