Oil Spill at the British Museum

13.07.2010
This morn­ing three mem­bers of the art activist group Cul­ture Beyond Oil poured non-tox­ic black oil around the British Museum’s world famous East­er Island sculp­ture, in protest at BP’s spon­sor­ship of the muse­um. Emi­ly James, Direc­tor of Just Do It, hap­pened to be there and cap­tured the action.

BP British Museum 1BP British Museum 2BP British Museum 313.07.2010
This morn­ing three mem­bers of the art activist group Cul­ture Beyond Oil poured non-tox­ic black oil around the British Museum’s world famous East­er Island sculp­ture, in protest at BP’s spon­sor­ship of the muse­um. Emi­ly James, Direc­tor of Just Do It, hap­pened to be there and cap­tured the action.

Fol­low­ing sim­i­lar actions at the Tate Mod­ern, Tate Britain and Nation­al Por­trait Gallery in recent weeks, the activists tar­get­ed the British Muse­um because of the annu­al spon­sor­ship it receives from the infa­mous oil com­pa­ny.

A recent report called ‘Licence to Spill’ from the cam­paign group Plat­form has point­ed to the ben­e­fits of cul­tur­al spon­sor­ship for oil com­pa­nies, stat­ing that “the finan­cial sup­port that the com­pa­nies [like Shell and BP] pro­vide [to cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions] strength­ens their posi­tion as a part of Britain’s cul­tur­al and social elite, and cre­ates a per­cep­tion of mak­ing a pos­i­tive con­tri­bu­tion to our soci­ety”, thus giv­ing them a “social license to oper­ate”.

The stat­ue around which the oil was poured* is known as Hoa Hakananai’a, a 2000 year old rel­ic tak­en from East­er Island by Euro­pean explor­ers. The sto­ry of the East­er Island stat­ues is often cit­ed as an exam­ple of the speed with which once strong civ­i­liza­tions have sud­den­ly col­lapsed.

Ben Coop­er, who is also part of Lib­er­ate Tate, said: “Oil spon­sor­ship of pub­lic insti­tu­tions is a prob­lem that stretch­es way beyond BP and the cat­a­stro­phe in the Gulf of Mex­i­co. The oil indus­try has a long his­to­ry of envi­ron­men­tal and human rights abus­es, and is cur­rent­ly pulling us clos­er and clos­er to a poten­tial cat­a­stro­phe on a glob­al scale.

“Just like the forests on East­er Island, oil rep­re­sents a resource being over-exploit­ed despite mas­sive­ly increas­ing risks. With our relent­less search for oil we are risk­ing the col­lapse of the ecosys­tems on which we depend — just as the inhab­i­tants of East­er Island did 2000 years ago”.

VIDEO AND PICTURES HERE: http://just-do-it.org.uk/oil-spill-at-the-british-museum

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http://just-do-it.org.uk/