The British Museum in London was forced to temporarily close earlier today (19 May) when Greenpeace activists protested at BP’s sponsorship of the exhibition Sunken Cities, Egypt’s Lost Worlds (until 27 November).
The demonstrators climbed the museum’s front columns, unfurling 27-foot long banners emblazoned with the words Sinking Cities. The museum was subsequently closed from 10am to 2pm to ensure visitors’ safety, a spokeswoman says. A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said 11 people had been arrested for aggravated trespass.
Greenpeace spokeswoman Elena Polisano says in a statement: “We rebranded the exhibition and dressed the pillars at the entrance with five places that evoke flooding, extreme weather and rising sea levels in the 21st century.” These included New Orleans and Hebden Bridge, a town in West Yorkshire, UK, which was hit by severe floods last winter.
Polisano adds that the environmental group took a stand “because of the irony of an oil company sponsoring an exhibition whose name practically spells out impacts of climate change”.
A museum spokeswoman told us: “The British Museum is grateful to BP for their long-term support which has allowed the museum to bring world cultures to a global audience through hugely popular exhibitions and their associated public programmes.” The museum’s new director, Hartwig Fischer, is facing renewed pressure after BP announced in March that it would end its sponsorship of the Tate.
Sunken Cities, which opens today, presents 300 artefacts, around 200 of which were found off the coast of Egypt within the past 20 years by a team from the Institut Européen d’Archéologie Sous-Marine (IEASM) under the direction of the French archaeologist Franck Goddio. Highlights include a six-tonne, fourth-centuryBC statue of Hapi, the god of the inundation of the Nile.
