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Visitors to the renowned gallery are familiar to unexpected displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an simulated sun, descended down amusement rides, and seen robotic jellyfish hovering through the air. However this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nasal passages of a reindeer. The current artist commission for this cavernous space—created by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a winding structure modeled after the expanded inside of a reindeer's nasal passages. Once inside, they can wander around or relax on skins, listening on headphones to Sámi elders telling narratives and knowledge.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

What's the focus on the nose? It may sound quirky, but the installation pays tribute to a obscure scientific wonder: scientists have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it breathes in by 80 degrees celsius, allowing the creature to survive in extreme Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara notes, "creates a feeling of inferiority that you as a person are not in control over nature." She is a ex- journalist, young adult author, and rights advocate, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Maybe that fosters the potential to change your viewpoint or evoke some modesty," she continues.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The labyrinthine installation is one of several components in Sara's absorbing commission showcasing the culture, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total about 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They've endured persecution, forced assimilation, and suppression of their language by all four nations. By focusing on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi belief system and founding narrative, the art also highlights the community's challenges associated with the climate crisis, property rights, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Components

On the long entry slope, there's a looming, 26-metre sculpture of skins ensnared by power and light cables. It serves as a metaphor for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this component of the installation, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi term for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein solid coatings of ice develop as fluctuating conditions thaw and ice over the snow, locking in the reindeers' key winter sustenance, lichen. The condition is a result of global heating, which is occurring up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than elsewhere.

Three years ago, I met with Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and accompanied Sámi herders on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they carried containers of food pellets on to the exposed tundra to distribute by hand. The reindeer crowded round us, scratching the frozen ground in vain attempts for vegetative bits. This resource-intensive and demanding method is having a significant effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the alternative is starvation. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are dying—some from hunger, others drowning after plunging into streams through prematurely melting ice. To some extent, the installation is a memorial to them. "With the layering of materials, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Belief Systems

The sculpture also emphasizes the clear divergence between the industrial view of energy as a resource to be exploited for gain and survival and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an natural life force in animals, humans, and the environment. The gallery's past as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by regional governments. While attempting to be leaders for sustainable power, Nordic nations have locked horns with the Sámi over the development of turbine fields, water power facilities, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi argue their human rights, livelihoods, and culture are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a tiny group to protect your rights when the reasons are grounded in saving the world," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the language of sustainability, but nonetheless it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to continue habits of expenditure."

Individual Conflicts

Sara and her kin have personally conflicted with the state authorities over its ever-stricter rules on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's sibling initiated a set of finally failed legal cases over the forced culling of his livestock, supposedly to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a multi-year collection of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive curtain of numerous cranial remains, which was shown at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it is displayed in the entrance.

Art as Advocacy

Among the community, visual expression appears the only realm in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|