Concerts Opera Dance Theater Gigs Exhibits

	Cerny Inuit Collection CHukotka native Lyuba Eines made "Hunter and Bear Legend" in 2004.

Northern Lights

Artists from the Arctic regions of Canada and Russia show their ties - and defy the stereotypes of indigenous art.

By Alastair Gee
Published: March 3, 2006

The Arctic is not known for its artists. But a new exhibition aims to show the richness and diversity of art made by the indigenous people living at the top of the world, and the novel approaches they take to traditional subjects.

"Shared Arctic," which opens today at the State Museum of Oriental Art, consists of items from the Cerny Inuit Collection. Owned by Martha and Peter Cerny, the collection is normally on display in the couple's hometown of Bern, Switzerland, and it comprises 120 pieces, mainly by Inuit from northern Canada and indigenous peoples from the Yamalo-Nenets and Chukotka regions of Russia.

Except for a selection of objects found at a first-century dwelling in Chukotka, including the shapely wooden "Venus of Ekven," all of the works were made in the last 40 years.

With Axangayuk Shaa's dancing walruses and caribou, seemingly caught as they pull funky moves in a disco, and Sergei Luginin's owl, attired in a smart jacket -- a tongue-in-cheek take on an animal traditionally revered for its wisdom -- the pieces defy the stereotypes of indigenous art.

There are no wooden masks or dusty ceremonial objects. Rather, the exhibition features stylized walrus-bone sculptures of scenes from daily life and multicolored lithographs suggestive of Japanese woodblock prints, reflecting the modern artistic sensibility of the circumpolar peoples.

Still, traditional stories continue to form the subject matter of many pieces. Qaunaq Mikkigak's "Selfish Hunter" is a carving of the fisherman who hid his largest catches from his family -- and later choked to death on one. The fisherman is shown frowning, with a fish tied to his head for safekeeping.

In a recent interview at the museum, Martha Cerny explained that the theme uniting pieces at the exhibition was the shift toward more abstract and stylized representation. "Since the 1970s, there's been a move away from realism," she said. "You never would have seen a dancing polar bear before."

The reasons for this shift are pragmatic as much as anything else, she suggested.

The artists "have a shrewd business sense -- they know what we want to buy. And if you have a certain amount of security, a market, you're ready to experiment more."

The pieces are also linked by the artists' sense of connection to one another, even if some live thousands of kilometers apart. The Canadian Inuit originally migrated from northern Russia, and all share the experience of inhabiting a brutal polar environment. After the exhibition closes in Moscow, it will travel to Salekhard, capital of the Yamalo-Nenets region, at the request of the people who live there; as Cerny described it, they want to see what their cousins in North America are up to.

The curation of the show reflects how perceptions of indigenous art have changed in the past 20 years. At the 1984 "Primitivism" exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art -- infamous among anthropologists -- non-Western artwork was presented without dates or attribution to a specific artist.

At the time, curators thought that indigenous people lived in societies without a concept of history, making dating unnecessary, and that because their artists were inescapably bound by tradition, they could not be individually creative, which meant they did not need to be credited.

Cerny said she was never in doubt that indigenous artists should be accorded the same privileges as those from the West.

At the same time, however, she signalled that some Western ideas about art might have no place here.

"A lot of Inuit see art in the making of it, not necessarily in the finished product," Cerny said. "People are not interested in the objects that they've already made ... [or in] identifying finished objects as theirs."

The implication is that the popular notion of art in the West, as a completed work found in a gallery, might be too narrow. Art can also be the act of creation, and it can have a lifetime: a moment of birth and a moment of death.

For visitors to "Shared Arctic," the challenge is to reconcile their own idea of art, as something they are viewing, with that of the art's creators, for whom the moment of art has already passed.

"Shared Arctic" (Yediny Sever) runs to April 2 at the State Museum of Oriental Art, located at 12A Nikitsky Bulvar. Metro Arbatskaya. Tel. 291-9614.

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