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Visitors to the renowned gallery are used to unusual encounters in its expansive Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an simulated sun, glided down spiral slides, and seen robotic jellyfish drifting through the air. But this marks the inaugural time they will be immersing themselves in the detailed nasal passages of a reindeer. The current artistic project for this huge space—designed by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a maze-like structure based on the expanded interior of a reindeer's nose cavities. Once inside, they can meander around or chill out on pelts, tuning in on headphones to Sámi elders imparting stories and insights.

Why the Nose?

What's the focus on the nose? It could appear quirky, but the installation pays tribute to a little-known scientific wonder: experts have found that in under a second, the reindeer's nose can warm the surrounding air it inhales by eighty degrees, enabling the creature to endure in harsh Arctic temperatures. Enlarging the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara notes, "generates a feeling of smallness that you as a person are not in control over nature." She is a former reporter, children's author, and rights advocate, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that generates the potential to alter your perspective or evoke some modesty," she adds.

A Celebration to Traditional Ways

The maze-like installation is among various features in Sara's engaging exhibition showcasing the culture, understanding, and beliefs of the Sámi, the continent's original inhabitants. Partially migratory, the Sámi number roughly 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, Finland, the Swedish Lapland, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an area they call Sápmi). They have experienced discrimination, cultural suppression, and repression of their language by all four states. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the center of the Sámi mythology and origin tale, the art also draws attention to the community's issues relating to the global warming, property rights, and external control.

Meaning in Materials

At the lengthy entrance incline, there's a towering, 26-meter sculpture of pelts entangled by electrical wires. It serves as a metaphor for the societal frameworks restricting the Sámi. Like an electrical tower, part celestial ladder, this section of the exhibit, named Goavve-, points to the Sámi word for an severe climatic event, in which dense layers of ice appear as varying temperatures liquefy and solidify again the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary winter sustenance, moss. The condition is a consequence of climate change, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Polar region than elsewhere.

A few years back, I visited Sara in the Norwegian far north during a icy season and went with Sámi herders on their Arctic vehicles in biting cold as they carried trailers of food pellets on to the exposed Arctic plains to distribute by hand. The reindeer crowded round us, digging the slippery ground in futility for lichen-covered pieces. This costly and labour-intensive process is having a significant effect on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' self-sufficiency. But the alternative is starvation. As goavvi winters become commonplace, reindeer are succumbing—some from lack of food, others submerging after falling into streams through unstable frozen surfaces. To some extent, the work is a tribute to them. "With the layering of materials, in a way I'm introducing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Opposing Belief Systems

This artwork also emphasizes the clear divergence between the western view of energy as a commodity to be utilized for gain and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of life force as an natural essence in creatures, humans, and the environment. The gallery's history as a industrial facility is tied up in this, as is what the Sámi consider environmental exploitation by regional governments. While attempting to be exemplars for clean sources, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the construction of turbine fields, river barriers, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their legal protections, ways of life, and traditions are endangered. "It's very difficult being such a small minority to defend yourself when the arguments are grounded in global sustainability," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the rhetoric of environmentalism, but yet it's just attempting to find alternative ways to maintain patterns of consumption."

Personal Conflicts

She 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 undertook a series of unsuccessful court actions over the forced culling of his animals, apparently to stop vegetation depletion. To back him, Sara produced a four-year series of artworks titled Pile O'Sápmi featuring a massive drape of numerous reindeer skulls, which was displayed at the the event Documenta 14 and later purchased by the public gallery, where it resides in the entryway.

The Role of Art in Awareness

For many Sámi, visual expression appears the sole sphere in which they can be understood by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|