Exhibition of the week Arctic: culture and climate
The British Museum, London WC1 (020-7323 8000, britishmuseum.org). Until 21 February
It’s hard to imagine an environment more hostile than the icy wilderness north of the Arctic Circle, said Rachel Campbell-Johnston in The Times. Inhospitable even in their summer months, the northernmost regions of the United States, Canada, Scandinavia and Russia, as well as Greenland, are nonetheless home to dozens of indigenous populations who have “managed not just to survive but to thrive”, with access to only the most basic of resources. These “highly resilient and inventively adaptable” people are the subject of a new exhibition at the British Museum, which reaches back across 30,000 years to explore their history and culture, as well as the very real threat to their existence posed by climate change. Bringing together some 280 artefacts, from a “toddler’s all-in-one romper suit made of caribou-fawn fur” to a mask of the North Wind used by the Yupiit people of western Alaska during spirit dances, it adds up to an atmospheric experience that will take you on a remarkable “journey to the frozen fringes of our planet”.
“Animals are everywhere here, as images and the subjects of myth, but also as a resource,” said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. The uses the people of the Arctic have found for the ivory, skins, scales and guts of the beasts they catch are “dazzling”. Among the more eye-catching exhibits are a 19th century “bag made from salmon skin”; “a whalebone breastplate worn by an Arctic warrior in the 3rd century BC”; and a pair of “walrus ivory snow-goggles from between AD200 and AD400” that look like “props for a prehistoric sci-fi film”. Elsewhere, we see an extraordinary sealskin whaling suit created by the Kalaallit people of southwest Greenland around 1834. For its wearer, the suit would have served both as a buoyancy aid and a kind of “magical garment”: its creators believed that it would grant its occupant the “power of a seal”, so they could hurl themselves onto a whale’s back into the iciest of waters. This is one of those “rare exhibitions” that makes you “see the heroism of being human”.
There are moments when the show’s attitude towards its subjects feels almost too reverential, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph: the curators are occasionally prone to “dewyeyed sycophancy”, discussing the people of the Arctic as if they were “pristine as fresh snow”. Even so, the exhibition has an uncomfortable “urgency” to it: since 1979, a graphic display informs us, global warming has melted an extraordinary 75% of Arctic sea ice; scientists believe that within the next 20 years, it will have disappeared entirely, ending ways of life that have lasted for millennia, and ushering in “catastrophic” consequences for the rest of humanity. This knowledge gives a thoroughly “elegiac” undertone to everything we see here; ultimately, this “engrossing” show is a profoundly moving testament to “the miraculous inventiveness of the human spirit”.