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Guests to the renowned gallery are accustomed to unexpected displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've basked under an artificial sun, glided down helter skelters, and seen automated jellyfish drifting through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be immersing themselves in the complex nose chambers of a reindeer. The latest artist commission for this immense space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a maze-like design based on the enlarged interior of a reindeer's nose passages. Once inside, they can stroll around or unwind on pelts, tuning in on headphones to Sámi elders imparting narratives and wisdom.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It might sound playful, but the exhibit honors a rarely recognized scientific wonder: researchers have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it inhales by 80°C, enabling the creature to survive in inhospitable Arctic climates. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "produces a feeling of smallness that you as a human being are not in control over nature." She is a former writer, writer for kids, and land defender, who is from a pastoral family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that fosters the possibility to alter your viewpoint or spark some modesty," she continues.

A Tribute to Traditional Ways

The winding design is one of several components in Sara's engaging commission honoring the culture, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi count about 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They have endured oppression, cultural suppression, and eradication of their tongue by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi belief system and founding narrative, the installation also draws attention to the group's issues associated with the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Metaphor in Elements

Along the long access ramp, there's a looming, 26-metre structure of reindeer hides trapped by electrical wires. It represents a metaphor for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this part of the exhibit, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, wherein thick sheets of ice develop as fluctuating weather liquefy and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' primary cold-season nourishment, fungus. This phenomenon is a result of global heating, which is happening up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than in other regions.

A few years back, I met with Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and joined Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they carried containers of supplementary feed on to the exposed Arctic plains to distribute by hand. The reindeer gathered round us, pawing the icy ground in vain for vegetative pieces. This resource-intensive and demanding procedure is having a drastic impact on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. Yet the alternative is death. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—a number from hunger, others submerging after falling into lakes and rivers through prematurely melting ice. In a sense, the installation is a memorial to them. "With the layering of elements, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

This artwork also underscores the sharp difference between the modern view of energy as a asset to be harnessed for profit and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of energy as an innate power in creatures, people, and nature. The gallery's legacy as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by regional governments. In their efforts to be standard bearers for sustainable power, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi argue their legal protections, ways of life, and way of life are endangered. "It's challenging being such a limited population to defend yourself when the justifications are grounded in environmental protection," Sara notes. "Extractivism has co-opted the discourse of ecology, but nonetheless it's just attempting to find alternative ways to maintain patterns of expenditure."

Personal Struggles

Sara and her relatives have themselves clashed with the state authorities over its tightening policies on reindeer management. In 2016, Sara's brother embarked on a sequence of finally failed court actions over the required reduction of his livestock, supposedly to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara produced a multi-year collection of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal curtain of 400 cranial remains, which was exhibited at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the public gallery, where it resides in the lobby.

Creative Expression as Awareness

For many Sámi, art is the sole realm in which they can be understood by the global community. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|