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Attendees to the renowned gallery are accustomed to unexpected displays in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an simulated sun, slid down spiral slides, and witnessed automated jellyfish hovering through the air. Yet this marks the inaugural time they will be venturing themselves in the complex nose chambers of a reindeer. The newest artistic project for this immense space—developed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes patrons into a maze-like structure based on the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Upon entering, they can wander around or relax on pelts, tuning in on headphones to community leaders imparting tales and insights.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It might appear playful, but the exhibit celebrates a obscure scientific wonder: researchers have uncovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the ambient air it breathes in by eighty degrees, helping the animal to survive in harsh Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "generates a sense of inferiority that you as a person are not superior over nature." Sara is a former writer, young adult author, and rights advocate, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that generates the possibility to shift your perspective or trigger some humbleness," she adds.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The winding structure is one of several elements in Sara's absorbing commission honoring the culture, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi total approximately 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an region they call Sápmi). They've experienced discrimination, integration policies, and suppression of their dialect by all four nations. Through highlighting the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the work also highlights the community's struggles associated with the environmental emergency, loss of territory, and external control.

Symbolism in Elements

At the extended access slope, there's a towering, eighty-five-foot sculpture of reindeer hides trapped by power and light cables. It serves as a symbol for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this component of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, whereby thick coatings of ice develop as varying temperatures thaw and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' key cold-season sustenance, moss. The condition is a result of climate change, which is happening up to four times faster in the Far North than globally.

Previously, I met with Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in freezing temperatures as they transported trailers of animal nutrition on to the exposed tundra to distribute by hand. The herd gathered round us, digging the frozen ground in vain for mossy bits. This costly and labour-intensive process is having a significant effect on herding practices—and on the animals' independence. Yet the alternative is malnutrition. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are perishing—some from starvation, others drowning after sinking in streams through prematurely melting ice. To some extent, the work is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm transporting the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

This artwork also underscores the clear divergence between the western view of energy as a asset to be exploited for gain and existence and the Sámi worldview of vitality as an inherent essence in creatures, humans, and the environment. The gallery's history as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider eco-imperialism by regional governments. In their efforts to be standard bearers for sustainable power, Scandinavian countries have clashed with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, river barriers, and mines on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their legal protections, ways of life, and traditions are endangered. "It's hard being such a tiny group to defend yourself when the arguments are rooted in saving the world," Sara notes. "Resource exploitation has co-opted the rhetoric of ecology, but yet it's just striving to find better ways to maintain patterns of expenditure."

Family Conflicts

The artist and her kin have themselves clashed with the state authorities over its increasingly stringent rules on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's sibling initiated a set of unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his livestock, ostensibly to stop excessive feeding. As a show of solidarity, Sara developed a four-year series of pieces called Pile O'Sápmi comprising a colossal curtain of numerous animal bones, which was shown at the 2017's show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the lobby.

The Role of Art in Activism

For many Sámi, creative work seems the only sphere in which they can be listened to by outsiders. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|