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Attendees to the renowned gallery are familiar to surprising encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have basked under an man-made sun, descended down amusement rides, and seen automated sea creatures hovering through the air. But this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nasal cavities of a reindeer. The current artist commission for this immense space—developed by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages gallerygoers into a winding design inspired by the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose airways. Upon entering, they can meander around or unwind on skins, listening on earphones to tribal seniors sharing tales and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why choose the nasal structure? It could sound whimsical, but the artwork honors a obscure scientific wonder: experts have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the ambient air it breathes in by eighty degrees, allowing the creature to endure in harsh Arctic conditions. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara says, "generates a feeling of smallness that you as a human being are not in control over nature." The artist is a former reporter, young adult author, and land defender, who comes from a herding family in northern Norway. "Maybe that creates the potential to alter your viewpoint or spark some modesty," she adds.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The winding design is one of several elements in Sara's engaging commission showcasing the traditions, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi total about 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They've faced persecution, cultural suppression, and suppression of their tongue by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the installation also highlights the group's challenges associated with the climate crisis, loss of territory, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Materials

Along the extended entry slope, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot structure of pelts entangled by power and light cables. It represents a metaphor for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Part pylon, part spiritual ascent, this component of the installation, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, in which thick coatings of ice form as changing weather thaw and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' key winter sustenance, fungus. The condition is a outcome of planetary warming, which is occurring up to four times faster in the Polar region than elsewhere.

A few years back, I met with Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in biting cold as they hauled containers of food pellets on to the exposed Arctic plains to distribute through labor. These animals crowded round us, pawing the frozen ground in vain for mossy pieces. This resource-intensive and labour-intensive process is having a drastic impact on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the other option is death. As these icy periods become frequent, reindeer are dying—some from hunger, others drowning after plunging into lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the work is a memorial to them. "With the layering of elements, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

The installation also highlights the clear contrast between the modern understanding of energy as a commodity to be exploited for gain and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of energy as an inherent life force in creatures, people, and land. The gallery's history as a coal and oil power station is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by regional governments. In their efforts to be exemplars for sustainable power, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their human rights, livelihoods, and traditions are endangered. "It's challenging being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the reasons are based on environmental protection," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the rhetoric of ecology, but nonetheless it's just aiming to find better ways to continue habits of consumption."

Individual Challenges

Sara and her family have themselves clashed with the national administration over its tightening regulations on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's sibling embarked on a set of unsuccessful lawsuits over the required reduction of his animals, supposedly to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara developed a four-year series of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi including a huge drape of 400 animal bones, which was exhibited at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the national institution, where it is displayed in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

For numerous Indigenous people, visual expression is the sole domain in which they can be heard by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|