Tezi Gabunia’s Breaking News: The Flooding Of The Louvre

The world’s most acclaimed art museum is immersed in water by a fictional flooding in ‘Breaking News: The Flooding Of The Louvre’, the latest video work by Georgian visual artist, Tezi Gabunia.

Natural disaster linked to climate change, and the responses of our modern media culture, are the concerns at the helm of Gabunia’s project. Of particular concern to the Tbilisi-based artist are the Paris floods of 2018, and the subsequent laissez-faire attitudes shown through news media coverage at the time. In ‘Breaking News’, water enters the prestigious museum venue, slowly filling it and destroying the famous exhibits it holds. The miniature Louvre was borrowed from an earlier exhibition by Gabunia titled ‘Put Your Head into Gallery’, where viewers were encouraged to put their head inside the museum models to literally become part of the art on display. The uncannily realistic video footage is Gabunia’s reminder that the threat of catastrophe is perhaps not as far fetched as would seem.