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Visitors to the renowned gallery are familiar to surprising encounters in its vast Turbine Hall. They have basked under an artificial sun, glided down spiral slides, and witnessed robotic jellyfish drifting through the air. Yet this marks the initial time they will be immersing themselves in the complex nose cavities of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this cavernous space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a labyrinthine construction based on the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Inside, they can wander around or chill out on pelts, listening on headphones to tribal seniors imparting tales and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

What's the focus on the nose? It could seem playful, but the exhibit honors a obscure natural marvel: scientists have discovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it inhales by 80°C, enabling the animal to survive in extreme Arctic climates. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara notes, "creates a feeling of smallness that you as a person are not superior over nature." She is a former journalist, young adult author, and rights advocate, who comes from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Possibly that fosters the possibility to change your perspective or evoke some humbleness," she continues.

An Homage to Sámi Culture

The winding structure is part of a components in Sara's engaging exhibition celebrating the culture, understanding, and philosophy of the Sámi, the sole native group in Europe. Partially migratory, the Sámi number roughly 100,000 people spread across the Norwegian north, the Finnish Arctic, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They have experienced discrimination, cultural suppression, and repression of their tongue by all four nations. By focusing on the reindeer, an animal at the core of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the work also highlights the group's struggles relating to the environmental emergency, land dispossession, and external control.

Metaphor in Materials

Along the long access ramp, there's a looming, 26-metre formation of pelts trapped by power and light cables. It serves as a metaphor for the political and economic systems constraining the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part heavenly staircase, this component of the installation, called Goavve-, refers to the Sámi name for an extreme weather phenomenon, whereby thick layers of ice develop as fluctuating weather melt and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' main cold-season nourishment, moss. Goavvi is a result of planetary warming, which is happening up to four times faster in the Arctic than in other regions.

Three years ago, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a severe cold period and went with Sámi herders on their snowmobiles in freezing temperatures as they transported trailers of food pellets on to the barren Arctic plains to distribute manually. These animals surrounded round us, pawing the slippery ground in vain attempts for vegetative morsels. This resource-intensive and laborious procedure is having a drastic influence on animal rearing—and on the animals' independence. Yet the choice is starvation. When such conditions become frequent, reindeer are succumbing—some from starvation, others drowning after plunging into streams through unstable frozen surfaces. In a sense, the installation is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of components, in a way I'm bringing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Worldviews

The installation also underscores the stark divergence between the western understanding of power as a resource to be harnessed for profit and survival and the Sámi worldview of life force as an innate essence in animals, people, and nature. The gallery's history as a coal and oil power station is linked with this, as is what the Sámi view as environmental exploitation by regional governments. While attempting to be exemplars for clean sources, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their legal protections, incomes, and culture are endangered. "It's hard being such a small minority to defend yourself when the reasons are rooted in saving the world," Sara notes. "Mining practices has co-opted the language of environmentalism, but yet it's just attempting to find better ways to continue practices of use."

Individual Challenges

Sara and her family have themselves disagreed with the state authorities over its tightening regulations on animal husbandry. Previously, Sara's brother embarked on a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful lawsuits over the forced culling of his animals, apparently to stop overgrazing. As a show of solidarity, Sara created a multi-year collection of artworks called Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal curtain of four hundred cranial remains, which was shown at the the show Documenta 14 and later obtained by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the entrance.

Art as Advocacy

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