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Attendees to the renowned gallery are familiar to unusual encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have sunbathed under an artificial sun, slid down helter skelters, and witnessed automated sea creatures floating through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the complex nose passages of a reindeer. The newest artistic project for this cavernous space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes patrons into a maze-like structure based on the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nasal passages. Once inside, they can wander around or relax on reindeer hides, tuning in on earphones to community leaders sharing tales and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It may seem playful, but the exhibit celebrates a obscure biological feat: experts have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it breathes in by 80 degrees celsius, helping the animal to endure in harsh Arctic conditions. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "produces a sense of inferiority that you as a individual are not in control over nature." Sara is a ex- reporter, writer for kids, and land defender, who comes from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Possibly that creates the possibility to change your outlook or spark some humility," she adds.

A Tribute to Sámi Culture

The winding design is part of a elements in Sara's absorbing exhibition celebrating the traditions, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi total roughly 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Kola region (an area they call Sápmi). They have endured oppression, cultural suppression, and suppression of their tongue by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the art also spotlights the group's issues associated with the climate crisis, loss of territory, and colonialism.

Meaning in Components

At the lengthy entry ramp, there's a looming, 26-metre sculpture of pelts trapped by utility lines. It serves as a analogy for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this part of the artwork, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, in which solid layers of ice appear as varying temperatures thaw and solidify again the snow, locking in the reindeers' main winter sustenance, moss. This phenomenon is a outcome of global heating, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I met with Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they hauled containers of food pellets on to the barren Arctic plains to provide through labor. The herd crowded round us, pawing the icy ground in vain attempts for vegetative morsels. This costly and labour-intensive process is having a severe influence on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the choice is death. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—a number from hunger, others submerging after plunging into water bodies through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the art is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

This artwork also underscores the stark difference between the modern understanding of electricity as a resource to be harnessed for profit and survival and the Sámi outlook of vitality as an innate power in creatures, humans, and land. This venue's history as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as eco-imperialism by Nordic countries. As they strive to be exemplars for clean sources, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of windfarms, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and way of life are at risk. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to defend yourself when the arguments are rooted in saving the world," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the rhetoric of environmentalism, but yet it's just aiming to find alternative ways to persist in habits of consumption."

Personal Struggles

Sara and her relatives have themselves clashed with the state authorities over its increasingly stringent policies on herding. Previously, Sara's sibling undertook a set of finally failed lawsuits over the required reduction of his livestock, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara created a multi-year series of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a huge curtain of 400 animal bones, which was exhibited at the the event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the national institution, where it hangs in the entrance.

Art as Awareness

For many Sámi, visual expression seems the exclusive sphere in which they can be listened to by the global community. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|