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Visitors to the renowned gallery are used to surprising experiences in its spacious Turbine Hall. They have relaxed under an simulated sun, glided down amusement rides, and observed robotic jellyfish drifting through the air. However this marks the inaugural time they will be immersing themselves in the intricate nasal passages of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this immense space—developed by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—encourages visitors into a labyrinthine structure modeled after the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nasal cavities. Once inside, they can stroll around or relax on skins, tuning in on headphones to tribal seniors imparting tales and insights.

Focus on the Nasal Passages

Why choose the nasal structure? It might appear playful, but the exhibit pays tribute to a rarely recognized biological feat: experts have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it takes in by 80 degrees celsius, allowing the creature to thrive in extreme Arctic temperatures. Scaling the nose to bigger than a person, Sara says, "creates a sense of insignificance that you as a person are not in control over nature." The artist is a ex- journalist, young adult author, and rights advocate, who comes from a pastoral family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Maybe that creates the potential to alter your viewpoint or spark some humility," she continues.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The maze-like structure is one of several elements in Sara's immersive exhibition honoring the heritage, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi count about 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an area they call Sápmi). They've experienced oppression, cultural suppression, and repression of their dialect by all four countries. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the core of the Sámi belief system and founding narrative, the work also spotlights the community's challenges associated with the climate crisis, property rights, and external control.

Meaning in Materials

At the lengthy entrance incline, there's a towering, eighty-five-foot sculpture of pelts ensnared by electrical wires. It can be read as a metaphor for the political and economic systems limiting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part spiritual ascent, this section of the artwork, named Goavve-, relates to the Sámi word for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby thick layers of ice form as changing weather thaw and solidify again the snow, trapping the reindeers' main cold-season nourishment, fungus. Goavvi is a outcome of climate change, which is taking place up to at an accelerated rate in the Arctic than globally.

A few years back, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and went with Sámi reindeer keepers on their motorized sleds in chilly conditions as they hauled trailers of food pellets on to the wind-scoured frozen landscape to provide through labor. These animals crowded round us, scratching the frozen ground in futility for mossy pieces. This costly and laborious method is having a severe impact on herding practices—and on the animals' natural survival. Yet the other option is starvation. When such conditions become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—some from lack of food, others submerging after falling into lakes and rivers through unstable frozen surfaces. On one level, the work is a memorial to them. "By overlapping of components, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Diverging Belief Systems

This artwork also highlights the sharp contrast between the western view of power as a commodity to be exploited for profit and survival and the Sámi philosophy of vitality as an natural power in animals, individuals, and land. The gallery's legacy as a fossil fuel plant is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi see as green colonialism by Scandinavian states. While attempting to be standard bearers for sustainable power, these states have locked horns with the Sámi over the construction of wind energy projects, river barriers, and mines on their native soil; the Sámi argue their legal protections, incomes, and traditions are endangered. "It's hard being such a tiny group to stand your ground when the arguments are based on global sustainability," Sara observes. "Mining practices has adopted the language of environmentalism, but yet it's just striving to find more suitable ways to persist in patterns of use."

Individual Conflicts

Sara and her kin have themselves disagreed with the national administration over its ever-stricter regulations on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's brother embarked on a series of unsuccessful lawsuits over the mandatory slaughter of his herd, ostensibly to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara produced a extended collection of pieces titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive screen of four hundred reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the 2017 show Documenta 14 and later purchased by the national institution, where it resides in the entrance.

Art as Awareness

Among the community, visual expression seems the only domain in which they can be listened to by people of other nations. Recently, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|