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Attendees to the renowned gallery are used to unusual experiences in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an artificial sun, slid down spiral slides, and seen AI-powered sea creatures drifting through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nasal chambers of a reindeer. The latest artistic project for this cavernous space—created by Indigenous Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a labyrinthine structure based on the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nasal airways. Inside, they can wander around or chill out on pelts, listening on headphones to Sámi elders imparting narratives and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It may sound whimsical, but the exhibit celebrates a little-known natural marvel: researchers have found that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the surrounding air it takes in by 80°C, enabling the animal to endure in extreme Arctic temperatures. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara says, "generates a sense of inferiority that you as a person are not dominant over nature." She is a ex- journalist, writer for kids, and rights advocate, who is from a reindeer-herding family in northern Norway. "Perhaps that creates the chance to shift your viewpoint or evoke some humbleness," she continues.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The maze-like installation is one of several elements in Sara's absorbing commission celebrating the heritage, knowledge, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number roughly 100,000 people ranged across the Norwegian north, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They have experienced persecution, integration policies, and eradication of their tongue by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi cosmology and creation story, the art also spotlights the group's issues relating to the climate crisis, land dispossession, and external control.

Meaning in Components

Along the extended access slope, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot formation of reindeer hides trapped by utility lines. It represents a analogy for the governance and financial structures constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this section of the artwork, titled Goavve-, relates to the Sámi term for an harsh environmental condition, in which solid layers of ice form as varying conditions thaw and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' main winter nourishment, fungus. This phenomenon is a consequence of climate change, which is taking place up to at an accelerated rate in the Far North than globally.

Previously, I visited Sara in a remote town during a icy season and accompanied Sámi reindeer keepers on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they transported containers of food pellets on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to dispense through labor. The reindeer gathered round us, scratching the icy ground in futility for vegetative bits. This costly and labour-intensive method is having a severe influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. Yet the other option is death. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—some from hunger, others suffocating after sinking in water bodies through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the installation is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

The sculpture also emphasizes the stark divergence between the modern understanding of power as a commodity to be harnessed for profit and survival and the Sámi philosophy of life force as an innate power in creatures, individuals, and nature. This venue's history as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as green colonialism by regional governments. In their efforts to be standard bearers for clean sources, Nordic nations have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of windfarms, river barriers, and digging operations on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and culture are at risk. "It's very difficult being such a tiny group to protect your rights when the reasons are grounded in saving the world," Sara observes. "Extractivism has adopted the discourse of environmentalism, but nonetheless it's just attempting to find better ways to maintain practices of consumption."

Family Conflicts

The artist and her relatives have personally conflicted with the national administration over its increasingly stringent regulations on herding. A few years ago, Sara's sibling undertook a set of unsuccessful court actions over the required reduction of his animals, supposedly to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara created a multi-year series of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge screen of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at the 2017's event Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the entryway.

The Role of Art in Awareness

For many Sámi, visual expression is the sole realm in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|