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Guests to the renowned gallery are accustomed to unusual displays in its vast Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an simulated sun, slid down helter skelters, and observed robotic jellyfish hovering through the air. But this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nose cavities of a reindeer. The current creative installation for this huge space—created by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a winding design inspired by the expanded inside of a reindeer's nasal airways. Once inside, they can meander around or unwind on skins, tuning in on earphones to Sámi elders telling tales and knowledge.

The Significance of the Nose

Why choose the nasal structure? It may appear quirky, but the exhibit celebrates a obscure natural marvel: scientists have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the surrounding air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the creature to endure in inhospitable Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "generates a feeling of inferiority that you as a human being are not superior over nature." The artist is a former writer, young adult author, and rights advocate, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Maybe that fosters the potential to shift your viewpoint or evoke some modesty," she continues.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The maze-like structure is part of a components in Sara's engaging commission celebrating the heritage, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number about 100,000 people distributed across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They have experienced persecution, cultural suppression, and suppression of their dialect by all four nations. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the art also draws attention to the group's issues relating to the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Elements

At the extended entrance slope, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot sculpture of pelts entangled by utility lines. It can be read as a analogy for the governance and financial structures limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this section of the installation, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, in which dense coatings of ice form as fluctuating temperatures thaw and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' key winter nourishment, lichen. Goavvi is a result of climate change, which is taking place up to four times faster in the Far North than globally.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and joined Sámi pastoralists on their motorized sleds in freezing temperatures as they transported trailers of food pellets on to the barren Arctic plains to provide by hand. The reindeer gathered round us, digging the frozen ground in vain for vegetative pieces. This expensive and demanding method is having a severe influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. Yet the alternative is death. As these icy periods become routine, reindeer are succumbing—some from starvation, others suffocating after falling into water bodies through prematurely melting ice. To some extent, the work is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of elements, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

The installation also highlights the stark divergence between the western interpretation of electricity as a asset to be harnessed for profit and survival and the Sámi outlook of energy as an inherent power in animals, individuals, and the environment. The gallery's past as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by Scandinavian states. As they strive to be exemplars for renewable energy, Nordic nations have clashed with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, water power facilities, and mines on their traditional territory; the Sámi contend their legal protections, ways of life, and traditions are endangered. "It's challenging being such a limited population to protect your rights when the arguments are rooted in global sustainability," Sara observes. "Mining practices has co-opted the language of environmentalism, but yet it's just striving to find alternative ways to persist in habits of use."

Personal Conflicts

Sara and her kin have personally conflicted with the state authorities over its ever-stricter regulations on herding. A few years ago, Sara's sibling embarked on a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful legal cases over the forced culling of his livestock, ostensibly to stop overgrazing. In support, Sara produced a extended set of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi including a huge drape of 400 animal bones, which was displayed at the the event Documenta 14 and later acquired by the national institution, where it is displayed in the entryway.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

Among the community, art appears the sole sphere in which they can be heard by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|