This Artist’s Vivid, Consciousness-Raising Video of a Flooded Louvre Is a Hit at the Armory Show. Here’s How He Did It
The chilling video speaks to the impending dangers of climate change.
The video shows a disaster: water rushing into a gallery, washing across the floor and rapidly rising in a room of Old Master canvases. The Louvre, one of the hallowed halls of Western civilization, is flooding. But despite the increasing number of extreme weather events caused by climate change, the video is only a work of art, depicting an event that hasn’t happened at the Paris musuem—but someday could.
“About two years ago, the Louvre actually got flooded by the Seine,” Alfred Kornfeld of Berlin’s Galerie Kornfeld, told Artnet News. “It was the result of very, very heavy rain.”
At the time, the museum closed its lower level as a precautionary measure, relocating some 35,000 works to higher ground. Nothing was damaged, but Georgian artist Tezi Gabunia couldn’t help imagining the worst. Her work, Breaking News: The Flooding of the Louvre, is a warning, both of the dangers of climate change, a force already unleashed on the world, and of the evils of fake news and the dissemination of misinformation.