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Visitors to the renowned gallery are used to unusual encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have basked under an man-made sun, descended down helter skelters, and witnessed AI-powered sea creatures drifting through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the detailed nose passages of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this huge space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a winding design inspired by the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nasal passages. Inside, they can stroll around or relax on pelts, tuning in on headphones to Sámi elders telling stories and insights.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It might appear whimsical, but the installation honors a obscure biological feat: researchers have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the creature to survive in inhospitable Arctic conditions. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara explains, "produces a feeling of inferiority that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." Sara is a former journalist, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who hails from a herding family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that fosters the chance to shift your outlook or trigger some humility," she states.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The winding design is among various components in Sara's immersive art project celebrating the heritage, science, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count about 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They've experienced persecution, cultural suppression, and repression of their dialect by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the art also highlights the community's challenges relating to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and external control.

Metaphor in Materials

At the extended entry slope, there's a towering, 26-metre sculpture of reindeer hides ensnared by utility lines. It serves as a symbol for the societal frameworks limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this component of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which solid layers of ice appear as varying weather thaw and refreeze the snow, encasing the reindeers' main winter sustenance, lichen. This phenomenon is a outcome of global heating, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Arctic than globally.

Previously, I visited Sara in a remote town during a icy season and went with Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they transported carts of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to provide through labor. The herd crowded round us, pawing the icy ground in vain for vegetative bits. This expensive and labour-intensive method is having a severe influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. However the choice is death. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—some from hunger, others submerging after sinking in water bodies through thinning ice sheets. To some extent, the installation is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm introducing the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

The installation also emphasizes the sharp difference between the industrial understanding of power as a resource to be exploited for profit and survival and the Sámi outlook of energy as an natural power in creatures, individuals, and nature. This venue's legacy as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be standard bearers for renewable energy, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their human rights, ways of life, and traditions are at risk. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to protect your rights when the justifications are rooted in environmental protection," Sara observes. "Extractivism has adopted the rhetoric of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to continue practices of use."

Family Struggles

Sara and her family have themselves conflicted with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter rules on herding. A few years ago, Sara's brother initiated a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the required reduction of his livestock, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara produced a multi-year set of creations called Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal screen of 400 reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the the event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Awareness

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