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Attendees to the renowned gallery are accustomed to surprising experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an simulated sun, descended down helter skelters, and seen robotic jellyfish hovering through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the complex nasal passages of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this immense space—created by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages patrons into a winding construction inspired by the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nose cavities. Upon entering, they can wander around or relax on skins, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors imparting tales and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It may seem whimsical, but the installation celebrates a rarely recognized natural marvel: scientists have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the ambient air it breathes in by 80 degrees celsius, helping the animal to endure in extreme Arctic conditions. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "generates a feeling of smallness that you as a person are not superior over nature." The artist is a former reporter, young adult author, and rights advocate, who is from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Maybe that fosters the potential to change your outlook or evoke some modesty," she adds.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The winding design is among various elements in Sara's engaging commission showcasing the heritage, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an region they call Sápmi). They have endured discrimination, integration policies, and eradication of their dialect by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the installation also spotlights the community's issues relating to the global warming, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Components

On the extended entry slope, there's a towering, 26-meter formation of skins entangled by utility lines. It can be read as a metaphor for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part spiritual ascent, this part of the artwork, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an harsh environmental condition, whereby dense sheets of ice form as varying weather liquefy and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' key cold-season sustenance, moss. The condition is a outcome of climate change, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Arctic than globally.

Three years ago, I traveled to see Sara in the Norwegian far north during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they hauled trailers of food pellets on to the wind-scoured tundra to dispense through labor. The reindeer crowded round us, digging the icy ground in futility for vegetative morsels. This resource-intensive and laborious method is having a significant impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the alternative is malnutrition. As goavvi winters become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—a number from lack of food, others drowning after falling into water bodies through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the installation is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm introducing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Perspectives

This artwork also highlights the sharp contrast between the modern interpretation of electricity as a asset to be harnessed for profit and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of life force as an natural essence in animals, people, and land. This venue's history as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by Nordic countries. As they strive to be leaders for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, river barriers, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi argue their human rights, ways of life, and way of life are endangered. "It's challenging being such a small minority to protect your rights when the reasons are grounded in environmental protection," Sara comments. "Mining practices has co-opted the language of ecology, but yet it's just striving to find better ways to persist in practices of consumption."

Individual Conflicts

Sara and her family have themselves clashed with the Norwegian government over its tightening rules on herding. A few years ago, Sara's sibling initiated a set of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the required reduction of his animals, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a multi-year set of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge screen of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the entrance.

Art as Advocacy

For numerous Indigenous people, visual expression is the exclusive domain in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|