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Guests to the renowned gallery are used to unusual encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have basked under an simulated sun, descended down helter skelters, and seen robotic sea creatures floating through the air. But this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nose cavities of a reindeer. The newest artistic project for this huge space—designed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—welcomes gallerygoers into a labyrinthine design based on the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Inside, they can stroll around or relax on reindeer hides, listening on earphones to Sámi elders imparting stories and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why the nose? It may seem whimsical, but the exhibit pays tribute to a obscure natural marvel: scientists have discovered that in a fraction of a second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it takes in by 80°C, enabling the creature to survive in extreme Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "creates a feeling of smallness that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." Sara is a ex- writer, children's author, and land defender, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that creates the possibility to alter your perspective or spark some humbleness," she adds.

A Tribute to Traditional Ways

The labyrinthine installation is among various components in Sara's engaging exhibition honoring the culture, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count approximately 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and the Kola region (an territory they call Sápmi). They have experienced persecution, forced assimilation, and eradication of their tongue by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi belief system and creation story, the work also spotlights the group's challenges associated with the global warming, loss of territory, and colonialism.

Symbolism in Components

On the long entry ramp, there's a looming, 26-meter structure of skins ensnared by power and light cables. It serves as a metaphor for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Part pylon, part celestial ladder, this section of the exhibit, titled Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an harsh environmental condition, wherein solid coatings of ice develop as fluctuating weather liquefy and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' main cold-season nourishment, moss. Goavvi is a result of planetary warming, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than elsewhere.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in a remote town during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi reindeer keepers on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they hauled trailers of supplementary feed on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to distribute manually. These animals crowded round us, scratching the frozen ground in vain attempts for vegetative bits. This expensive and demanding procedure is having a significant effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. Yet the choice is starvation. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are dying—a number from starvation, others drowning after sinking in water bodies through thinning ice sheets. On one level, the installation is a monument to them. "By overlapping of materials, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

The installation also underscores the stark difference between the industrial interpretation of electricity as a commodity to be utilized for profit and survival and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an innate essence in creatures, people, and land. The gallery's history as a fossil fuel plant is connected to this, as is what the Sámi view as eco-imperialism by regional governments. While attempting to be leaders for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of windfarms, river barriers, and extraction sites on their native soil; the Sámi contend their fundamental freedoms, incomes, and traditions are at risk. "It's challenging being such a small minority to defend yourself when the arguments are based on environmental protection," Sara comments. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the discourse of sustainability, but yet it's just striving to find alternative ways to persist in habits of expenditure."

Personal Conflicts

Sara and her family have themselves disagreed with the national administration over its increasingly stringent rules on herding. A few years ago, Sara's sibling initiated a series of finally failed legal cases over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, apparently to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara developed a multi-year series of artworks named Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive drape of numerous cranial remains, which was shown at the 2017 event Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it hangs in the entryway.

Art as Advocacy

For many Sámi, art appears the sole domain in which they can be heard by outsiders. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|