archive user guide
ge

Contemporary Art Archive - Tbilisi

Archive of Academic Writings

2021 Edition of the Project is supported by the Ministry of Culture, Sport and Youth of Georgia

Breaking News: Flooding of the Louvre

Installation

Tezi Gabunia

2018

Natural disaster increasingly linked to climate change has arrived at the museum of Louvre, which responds to the flooding of Paris in 2018. The artwork also respresents the issue of cultural leftovers. Recycling is the main value of the process. By destruction of a model that was a part of previous project Put Your Head into Gallery, the leftovers are reconstructed and new meanings and possibilities are created.
The flooding of the Louvre Museum speaks about news culture and our fluctuating perception of disasters as it is seen through the media. The scale of the disaster is often difficult to assess from news coverage. In the work “Breaking News” flood goes slowly into the room of the Louvre, letting the viewer to gradually watch the destruction of the interior. It brings the viewer shochinkly close to what has not happened but easily could have, the viewer sees the before and after effect in a highly visualized manner, which is as convincing and threatening, as fake. The artwork presents a scoop, a situation, where the information as a show exceeds the terrifying nature of catastrophe and where the real event is abolished. Is the information a new type of reality? Is it possible to cover real events? These issues arise during encounters of two situations - destruction of art artefacts and spectacular features of this process.


Text: Dato Koroshinadze