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Guests to the renowned gallery are used to unexpected experiences in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've relaxed under an artificial sun, descended down amusement rides, and seen automated jellyfish drifting through the air. Yet this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the intricate nose chambers of a reindeer. The current artist commission for this huge space—designed by Indigenous Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a winding structure modeled after the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose passages. Once inside, they can meander around or relax on skins, tuning in on earphones to tribal seniors telling tales and insights.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It might seem quirky, but the installation pays tribute to a little-known scientific wonder: researchers have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can heat the surrounding air it breathes in by eighty degrees, helping the animal to thrive in extreme Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara explains, "generates a sense of insignificance that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." She is a former reporter, young adult author, and environmental activist, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Maybe that generates the possibility to alter your viewpoint or spark some humbleness," she continues.

A Celebration to Indigenous Heritage

The labyrinthine structure is one of several elements in Sara's absorbing commission celebrating the heritage, science, and philosophy of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Semi-nomadic, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people distributed across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They have experienced persecution, forced assimilation, and suppression of their tongue by all four countries. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the installation also highlights the group's issues connected to the global warming, loss of territory, and external control.

Symbolism in Elements

Along the extended entry incline, there's a soaring, eighty-five-foot formation of reindeer hides ensnared by electrical wires. It represents a metaphor for the political and economic systems restricting the Sámi. Part pylon, part spiritual ascent, this component of the artwork, called Goavve-, points to the Sámi name for an harsh environmental condition, in which solid layers of ice form as varying conditions melt and ice over the snow, trapping the reindeers' main cold-season sustenance, moss. The condition is a outcome of planetary warming, which is occurring up to four times faster in the Far North than elsewhere.

A few years back, I visited Sara in a remote town during a severe cold period and went with Sámi herders on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they carried trailers of supplementary feed on to the barren frozen landscape to provide manually. These animals crowded round us, digging the slippery ground in futility for vegetative bits. This resource-intensive and laborious method is having a significant effect on animal rearing—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. However the choice is malnutrition. As these icy periods become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—some from hunger, others submerging after falling into water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. In a sense, the art is a tribute to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm introducing the phenomenon to London," says Sara.

Opposing Worldviews

The sculpture also underscores the sharp divergence between the industrial interpretation of electricity as a resource to be utilized for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi philosophy of energy as an natural essence in creatures, individuals, and nature. This venue's legacy as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as environmental exploitation by regional governments. As they strive to be exemplars for renewable energy, these states have locked horns with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, river barriers, and digging operations on their native soil; the Sámi argue their legal protections, ways of life, and traditions are at risk. "It's challenging being such a small minority to stand your ground when the reasons are grounded in global sustainability," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the discourse of ecology, but still it's just aiming to find more suitable ways to continue habits of use."

Individual Challenges

Sara and her family have personally conflicted with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter rules on herding. In 2016, Sara's brother embarked on a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the required reduction of his livestock, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a multi-year set of creations called Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal drape of 400 animal bones, which was exhibited at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it resides in the entrance.

Art as Awareness

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