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Visitors to the renowned gallery are accustomed to surprising displays in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an simulated sun, slid down amusement rides, and observed AI-powered sea creatures drifting through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nose passages of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this cavernous space—developed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a winding construction based on the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nose cavities. Once inside, they can meander around or unwind on pelts, tuning in on headphones to Sámi elders imparting narratives and insights.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It might sound whimsical, but the exhibit celebrates a obscure scientific wonder: scientists have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it breathes in by 80°C, helping the animal to thrive in harsh Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "creates a sense of insignificance that you as a human being are not superior over nature." She is a ex- reporter, children's author, and rights advocate, who hails from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that fosters the possibility to alter your perspective or evoke some humility," she states.

A Tribute to Traditional Ways

The maze-like installation is one of several features in Sara's engaging exhibition showcasing the traditions, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count about 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They've experienced oppression, cultural suppression, and suppression of their language by all four states. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the installation also highlights the people's challenges associated with the environmental emergency, property rights, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Elements

Along the extended entrance incline, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot formation of reindeer hides trapped by power and light cables. It represents a symbol for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this component of the installation, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, in which solid layers of ice develop as changing conditions liquefy and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' key winter nourishment, moss. Goavvi is a result of climate change, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Far North than globally.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi herders on their motorized sleds in freezing temperatures as they transported carts of food pellets on to the barren Arctic plains to provide manually. These animals gathered round us, scratching the icy ground in vain attempts for mossy morsels. This costly and demanding method is having a significant influence on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the alternative is death. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—some from lack of food, others suffocating after sinking in streams through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the work is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm transporting the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

The sculpture also underscores the stark divergence between the western understanding of power as a resource to be exploited for economic benefit and existence and the Sámi worldview of life force as an inherent life force in animals, people, and the environment. The gallery's past as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi consider green colonialism by regional governments. While attempting to be exemplars for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, river barriers, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi contend their human rights, incomes, and traditions are threatened. "It's hard being such a small minority to defend yourself when the justifications are based on saving the world," Sara comments. "Extractivism has co-opted the language of environmentalism, but yet it's just striving to find alternative ways to maintain practices of use."

Individual Challenges

Sara and her relatives have personally conflicted with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter regulations on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's sibling undertook a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful court actions over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, apparently to stop excessive feeding. To back him, Sara created a multi-year series of creations called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive curtain of 400 animal bones, which was shown at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it hangs in the lobby.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For numerous Indigenous people, visual expression seems the exclusive sphere in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|