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Attendees to the renowned gallery are used to unexpected displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an man-made sun, slid down spiral slides, and witnessed AI-powered sea creatures hovering through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the detailed nose cavities of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this cavernous space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages patrons into a labyrinthine design inspired by the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nose passages. Inside, they can wander around or chill out on skins, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors telling stories and knowledge.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why the nose? It may seem whimsical, but the exhibit pays tribute to a rarely recognized biological feat: researchers have discovered that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the incoming air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, helping the animal to thrive in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara explains, "produces a sense of smallness that you as a person are not dominant over nature." She is a ex- reporter, writer for kids, and land defender, who is from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that fosters the potential to shift your outlook or spark some modesty," she states.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The winding design is among various features in Sara's engaging art project honoring the traditions, knowledge, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi number roughly 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They've faced persecution, integration policies, and suppression 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 challenges associated with the global warming, property rights, and colonialism.

Meaning in Materials

At the extended access slope, there's a looming, 26-metre sculpture of skins entangled by utility lines. It serves as a analogy for the societal frameworks constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this component of the artwork, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby solid layers of ice appear as changing temperatures liquefy and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' key cold-season nourishment, moss. This phenomenon is a outcome of planetary warming, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Polar region than in other regions.

Previously, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a icy season and went with Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they carried trailers of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured tundra to distribute by hand. The reindeer gathered round us, scratching the icy ground in vain for mossy morsels. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive process is having a significant influence on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. Yet the alternative is death. As goavvi winters become frequent, reindeer are dying—a number from starvation, others submerging after falling into water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the installation is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

The installation also underscores the sharp contrast between the modern view of power as a resource to be exploited for gain and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an innate power in animals, people, and nature. The gallery's history as a fossil fuel plant is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be leaders for renewable energy, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, water power facilities, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi contend their legal protections, ways of life, and way of life are threatened. "It's challenging being such a small minority to protect your rights when the arguments are grounded in environmental protection," Sara notes. "Mining practices has adopted the rhetoric of ecology, but nonetheless it's just striving to find better ways to continue habits of use."

Personal Struggles

Sara and her kin have themselves disagreed with the state authorities over its increasingly stringent policies on herding. A few years ago, Sara's brother embarked on a sequence of unsuccessful legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, supposedly to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara developed a four-year set of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge curtain of numerous reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the the event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the public gallery, where it resides in the lobby.

The Role of Art in Advocacy

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work is the only domain in which they can be understood by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|