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Guests to the renowned gallery are familiar to unusual experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've basked under an artificial sun, glided down spiral slides, and seen AI-powered 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 latest artist commission for this cavernous space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes visitors into a maze-like design based on the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Inside, they can stroll around or chill out on skins, listening on earphones to Sámi elders telling stories and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

Why choose the nasal structure? It may sound playful, but the exhibit pays tribute to a little-known scientific wonder: researchers 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, allowing the creature to survive in inhospitable Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to larger than human size, Sara notes, "generates a perception of insignificance that you as a human being are not in control over nature." The artist is a ex- journalist, children's author, and land defender, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Possibly that generates the possibility to alter your perspective or evoke some modesty," she states.

A Celebration to Sámi Culture

The winding structure is part of a components in Sara's absorbing art project honoring the culture, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They have faced oppression, cultural suppression, and suppression of their language by all four states. Through highlighting the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi cosmology and founding narrative, the art also highlights the community's struggles connected to the global warming, loss of territory, and external control.

Metaphor in Elements

At the lengthy entrance slope, there's a soaring, 26-meter structure of skins ensnared by power and light cables. It can be read as a metaphor for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this part of the artwork, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby solid sheets of ice appear as changing conditions liquefy and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' key winter food, moss. This phenomenon is a outcome of climate change, which is taking place up to much more rapidly in the Far North than in other regions.

Previously, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they hauled trailers of food pellets on to the barren frozen landscape to dispense manually. The reindeer gathered round us, pawing the slippery ground in futility for mossy bits. This expensive and laborious method is having a severe effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. Yet the alternative is starvation. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—a number from hunger, others submerging after falling into lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the work is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

This artwork also emphasizes the clear difference between the industrial interpretation of energy as a asset to be harnessed for profit and livelihood and the Sámi philosophy of life force as an innate power in creatures, humans, and nature. This venue's legacy as a industrial facility is connected to this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by regional governments. While attempting to be leaders for clean sources, these states have locked horns with the Sámi over the development of windfarms, river barriers, and extraction sites on their traditional territory; the Sámi contend their human rights, ways of life, and culture are threatened. "It's challenging being such a limited population to stand your ground when the arguments are rooted in saving the world," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the language of sustainability, but still it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to maintain patterns of consumption."

Family Conflicts

Sara and her kin have themselves clashed with the national administration over its ever-stricter rules on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's sibling initiated a sequence of unsuccessful legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, supposedly to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara produced a extended series of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal curtain of 400 reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the the art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it hangs in the entryway.

Art as Advocacy

For numerous Indigenous people, art is the only domain in which they can be heard by outsiders. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|