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Visitors to the renowned gallery are familiar to surprising displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an man-made sun, glided down helter skelters, and witnessed AI-powered jellyfish drifting through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nasal chambers of a reindeer. The newest creative installation for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—encourages patrons into a labyrinthine structure modeled after the scaled-up interior of a reindeer's nose passages. Inside, they can wander around or unwind on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to Sámi elders sharing narratives and knowledge.

Why the Nose?

Why choose the nasal structure? It could sound quirky, but the artwork pays tribute to a little-known natural marvel: scientists have found that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the creature to thrive in inhospitable Arctic climates. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "produces a sense of inferiority that you as a human being are not dominant over nature." Sara is a former reporter, children's author, and environmental activist, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Possibly that fosters the potential to change your viewpoint or evoke some modesty," she continues.

A Tribute to Indigenous Heritage

The maze-like structure is one of several features in Sara's absorbing exhibition honoring the heritage, knowledge, and philosophy of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They've faced oppression, cultural suppression, and repression of their tongue by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi mythology and origin tale, the installation also spotlights the people's challenges relating to the global warming, land dispossession, and external control.

Meaning in Elements

On the extended access incline, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot sculpture of reindeer hides entangled by power and light cables. It can be read as a metaphor for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this section of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an harsh environmental condition, whereby thick sheets of ice form as changing conditions melt and refreeze the snow, locking in the reindeers' main winter food, fungus. The condition is a result of climate change, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Arctic than elsewhere.

A few years back, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their snowmobiles in chilly conditions as they hauled trailers of animal nutrition on to the barren tundra to provide manually. These animals gathered round us, scratching the frozen ground in vain attempts for lichen-covered bits. This expensive and laborious procedure is having a severe influence on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. Yet the other option is starvation. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—some from hunger, others drowning after plunging into lakes and rivers through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the installation is a monument to them. "With the layering of materials, in a way I'm bringing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

This artwork also emphasizes the stark divergence between the modern understanding of power as a resource to be harnessed for profit and survival and the Sámi worldview of energy as an natural life force in animals, people, and nature. The gallery's history as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be leaders for clean sources, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, water power facilities, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi contend their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and way of life are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to defend yourself when the justifications are rooted in global sustainability," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has adopted the rhetoric of ecology, but still it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to persist in patterns of use."

Individual Conflicts

Sara and her kin have themselves disagreed with the state authorities over its tightening policies on herding. A few years ago, Sara's sibling undertook a sequence of finally failed lawsuits over the forced culling of his livestock, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara produced a extended set of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive drape of 400 animal bones, which was displayed at the 2017's art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it hangs in the lobby.

Creative Expression as Awareness

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