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Guests to the renowned gallery are used to unusual encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an simulated sun, slid down amusement rides, and witnessed robotic sea creatures floating through the air. But this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nasal cavities of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this immense space—developed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites gallerygoers into a maze-like structure inspired by the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nasal airways. Inside, they can stroll around or unwind on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to Sámi elders sharing stories and wisdom.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It might seem whimsical, but the installation celebrates a rarely recognized biological feat: researchers have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the surrounding air it inhales by 80 degrees celsius, helping the creature to thrive in harsh Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "produces a perception of insignificance that you as a individual are not superior over nature." The artist is a ex- reporter, children's author, and rights advocate, who hails from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Perhaps that generates the chance to shift your perspective or trigger some modesty," she continues.

A Tribute to Indigenous Heritage

The maze-like installation is one of several features in Sara's immersive art project celebrating the culture, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They have experienced persecution, forced assimilation, and repression of their language by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the installation also highlights the group's issues relating to the climate crisis, land dispossession, and external control.

Metaphor in Components

At the extended entrance incline, there's a soaring, 26-metre formation of pelts ensnared by electrical wires. It serves as a metaphor for the societal frameworks constraining the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this component of the artwork, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, whereby dense layers of ice appear as varying weather thaw and ice over the snow, locking in the reindeers' main cold-season sustenance, lichen. Goavvi is a result of global heating, which is occurring up to four times faster in the Far North than elsewhere.

Previously, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and went with Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they hauled trailers of animal nutrition on to the wind-scoured tundra to provide by hand. The reindeer surrounded round us, pawing the frozen ground in vain for lichen-covered pieces. This costly and labour-intensive process is having a severe influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the choice is malnutrition. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are succumbing—a number from lack of food, others suffocating after plunging into streams through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the art is a monument to them. "With the layering of components, in a way I'm introducing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

This artwork also emphasizes the clear divergence between the industrial understanding of electricity as a resource to be harnessed for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi outlook of energy as an natural essence in creatures, humans, and land. This venue's history as a fossil fuel plant is connected to this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be standard bearers for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have locked horns with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, river barriers, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi argue their legal protections, incomes, and culture are threatened. "It's challenging being such a limited population to defend yourself when the reasons are rooted in environmental protection," Sara notes. "Mining practices has co-opted the rhetoric of ecology, but yet it's just striving to find more suitable ways to maintain habits of use."

Family Challenges

She and her family have themselves conflicted with the national administration over its tightening rules on herding. In 2016, Sara's brother undertook a set of finally failed legal cases over the forced culling of his livestock, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara created a four-year set of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal screen of four hundred animal bones, which was shown at the 2017's art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the lobby.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

Among the community, art seems the sole domain in which they can be understood by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|