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Attendees to the renowned gallery are used to unexpected displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They have basked under an artificial sun, glided down helter skelters, and observed automated sea creatures floating through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the complex nose chambers of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this huge space—designed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a maze-like design modeled after the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nasal passages. Inside, they can stroll around or relax on reindeer hides, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors imparting stories and knowledge.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It could sound whimsical, but the installation pays tribute to a rarely recognized scientific wonder: scientists have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it takes in by 80°C, enabling the animal to thrive in extreme Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "creates a feeling of smallness that you as a person are not superior over nature." She is a former reporter, children's author, and land defender, who hails from a herding family in northern Norway. "Possibly that creates the chance to change your perspective or trigger some humbleness," she states.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The labyrinthine design is one of several features in Sara's immersive exhibition honoring the culture, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They've faced oppression, cultural suppression, and eradication of their dialect by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and origin tale, the installation also draws attention to the group's issues associated with the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and colonialism.

Meaning in Elements

At the long entry slope, there's a looming, 26-metre structure of pelts entangled by electrical wires. It can be read as a analogy for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this component of the artwork, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which solid coatings of ice form as changing weather melt and refreeze the snow, trapping the reindeers' main cold-season food, moss. The condition is a result of climate change, which is occurring up to four times faster in the Arctic than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I met with Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they carried trailers of food pellets on to the exposed tundra to dispense through labor. These animals crowded round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain for mossy pieces. This expensive and demanding method is having a severe influence on herding practices—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the other option is malnutrition. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—some from hunger, others submerging after plunging into streams through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the work is a memorial to them. "With the layering of elements, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

This artwork also emphasizes the stark divergence between the western interpretation of electricity as a resource to be exploited for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi worldview of energy as an inherent life force in animals, people, and the environment. The gallery's legacy as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by regional governments. As they strive to be leaders for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, river barriers, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and way of life are endangered. "It's hard being such a limited population to protect your rights when the justifications are based on saving the world," Sara comments. "Mining practices has adopted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just attempting to find alternative ways to persist in patterns of use."

Personal Challenges

Sara and her relatives have themselves clashed with the national administration over its ever-stricter policies on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's brother embarked on a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the forced culling of his herd, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara created a extended collection of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive screen of 400 reindeer skulls, which was shown at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later purchased by the national institution, where it resides in the entrance.

The Role of Art in Activism

For numerous Indigenous people, creative work seems the exclusive realm in which they can be heard by outsiders. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|