Clockwise from top left: an Okvik head; an Eskimo bust of a man; an effigy of the large walrus; a weasel

Arctic Appreciation

Imagine yourself in a stark white expanse where the only sound is that of footsteps crunching in the snow. A rough, hand-drawn leaflet is your only guide. There is no audio commentary.

The feeling of isolation here is intense — and intentional. With the exhibit Upside Down, The Arctics, which opens this month at the Quai Branly museum in Paris, curator Edmund Carpenter says the idea is to allow visitors to experience the world in much the same way that ancient Eskimo societies did.

“Close to the Arctic Circle, where total darkness exists three months of the year and 24-hour daylight for three months, one has a different experience relative to daylight and darkness, to time and space,” Carpenter explains. “In a snowstorm, or in fog, the horizon disappears. One’s sense of direction depends on knowledge of winds, tides, bird cries — in other words, on nonvisual, nonlinear references.”

Designed by Carpenter, a filmmaker and anthropologist, and Quai Branly artistic director Doug Wheeler, Upside Down, The Arctics showcases more than 500 artifacts, including figurines and masks from the Arctic Canadian and Siberian Eskimo societies that have lived in the region for thousands of years. Museumgoers begin their journey in an Arctic “ice field,” then pass through rooms of extreme light and dark, experiencing the vastness of the icecap landscape.

The timing of the show is fortuitous, says Carpenter. “That the Arctic regions are now imperiled by what is increasingly understood to be a steadily warming climate only makes our appreciation of these Eskimo cultures more poignant. This terrain and these cultures, once isolated from the rest of the world, appear to us as timeless and limitless, yet we have become all too aware of their fragility.”

Upside Down, The Arctics opens September 30 and runs through January 11, 2009, at the Musée du Quai Branly, 37 Quai Branly, 33.1.56.617.000; quaibranly.fr