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Guests to the renowned gallery are used to surprising experiences in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have basked under an simulated sun, slid down amusement rides, and witnessed robotic jellyfish hovering through the air. However this marks the first time they will be engaging themselves in the detailed nose chambers of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this immense space—developed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a winding design inspired by the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nasal airways. Inside, they can wander around or relax on reindeer hides, listening on headphones to Sámi elders imparting tales and wisdom.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why choose the nasal structure? It could seem quirky, but the artwork honors a rarely recognized biological feat: scientists have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it inhales by 80 degrees celsius, allowing the creature to thrive in extreme Arctic climates. Expanding the nose to larger than human size, Sara notes, "produces a sense of inferiority that you as a person are not superior over nature." The artist is a former reporter, children's author, and rights advocate, who hails from a herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Possibly that generates the potential to alter your outlook or trigger some modesty," she continues.

An Homage to Indigenous Heritage

The winding installation is part of a elements in Sara's immersive commission celebrating the culture, understanding, and worldview of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an region they call Sápmi). They've experienced discrimination, forced assimilation, and eradication of their language by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi mythology and founding narrative, the work also highlights the community's challenges connected to the global warming, loss of territory, and external control.

Symbolism in Materials

At the long entrance incline, there's a towering, 26-meter structure of skins entangled by electrical wires. It can be read as a analogy for the societal frameworks constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this part of the installation, named Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an severe climatic event, wherein solid sheets of ice appear as fluctuating conditions liquefy and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary winter sustenance, moss. The condition is a consequence of global heating, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Polar region than in other regions.

A few years back, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a icy season and accompanied Sámi pastoralists on their snowmobiles in biting cold as they transported carts of food pellets on to the exposed frozen landscape to provide by hand. These animals gathered round us, scratching the slippery ground in futility for lichen-covered morsels. This expensive and labour-intensive method is having a severe influence on herding practices—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the other option is death. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are perishing—a number from lack of food, others submerging after plunging into water bodies through thinning ice sheets. In a sense, the work is a memorial to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Diverging Worldviews

This artwork also highlights the clear contrast between the industrial interpretation of power as a commodity to be exploited for profit and livelihood and the Sámi outlook of life force as an innate life force in animals, individuals, and land. This venue's history as a fossil fuel plant is connected to this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by Nordic countries. In their efforts to be standard bearers for renewable energy, these states have clashed with the Sámi over the building of windfarms, river barriers, and digging operations on their traditional territory; the Sámi argue their human rights, livelihoods, and traditions are at risk. "It's challenging being such a limited population to defend yourself when the justifications are based on global sustainability," Sara notes. "Mining practices has co-opted the language of environmentalism, but yet it's just attempting to find alternative ways to persist in practices of expenditure."

Family Challenges

She and her kin have themselves conflicted with the national administration over its ever-stricter rules on animal husbandry. In 2016, Sara's sibling undertook a series of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the forced culling of his livestock, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. In support, Sara developed a extended set of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi featuring a huge curtain of 400 animal bones, which was shown at the the show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the National Museum of Oslo, where it hangs in the entrance.

Creative Expression as Advocacy

For numerous Indigenous people, visual expression is the sole sphere in which they can be heard by the global community. In 2022, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|