DAVID ADAMS provides a round-up of some stories on the odder side of life…
A visitor of the Leopold museum looks at the painting ” A boy at the spring ” by Albin Egger Lienz after the museum tilted 15 of its paintings in protest of climate change in Vienna, Austria, on 22nd March, 2023. PICTURE: Reuters/Leonhard Foeger
• A Vienna museum where climate activists recently attacked the glass screen shielding a Gustav Klimt painting has responded with an exhibit entitled A Few Degrees More that tilts works to draw attention to the need for action on climate change. Activists from the group Last Generation smeared the screen in front of Klimt’s Death and Life at the Leopold Museum in Vienna and glued one of their hands to it in the November protest calling for an end to drilling for oil. “We found this way to be absolutely the wrong one,” the museum’s artistic director, Hans-Peter Wipplinger, told Reuters on the opening day of its response: a small exhibition with the full title A Few Degrees More (Will Turn the World into an Uncomfortable Place). It involves hanging 15 works by artists including Klimt and fellow Austrian great Egon Schiele at an angle, with texts calling attention to the effect that global warming of more than 1.5 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels would have on the landscapes depicted in them. “We wanted to initiate something productive, something communicative. That means conveying a message and not just in spectacular images (such as the protest) but by helping visitors learn about the situation and the various contexts of this global heating,” Wipplinger said. The exhibition runs until 26th June. – LEONHARD FOEGER, Vienna, Austria/Reuters
The zebra on the streets of Seoul, South Korea. PICTURE: Reuters TV
• A zebra escaped from a zoo in the South Korean capital Seoul on Thursday and wandered the streets of a residential district for three hours before being caught and taken home. Bemused pedestrians looked on as the beast trotted past cars, wandered down a street and poked its nose in garbage bins, footage showed. The zebra, named Sero, meaning vertical in Korean, had broken free from a zoo at the Seoul Children’s Grand Park. Officials managed to trap the zebra and give it anesthetic muscle relaxants, Seoul Gwangjin Fire Station said. It was taken back to the zoo on the back of a pick-up truck, footage showed. Video clips of Sero’s day out went viral on social media. “Literally a zebra crossing” one tweet read. – HYUNSU YIM, South Korea/Reuters
No more changing clocks for daylight saving in Nuuk, the capital of Greenland. PICTURE: Ruben Ramos/iStockphoto.
• While Lebanon has been going back and forth on the issue of daylight savings this week, that’s not the case in Greenland where residents last weekend shifted to daylight saving time – and now never intends going back. The semi-independent Danish territory has decided most of its territory will now permanently remain only three hours behind Denmark and much of Europe. The move came after the Greenland’s parliament, the Inatsisartut, voted to make the move last November on the basis that it will provide more time for people in Greenland to do business with Europe and North America and provide residents with an extra hour in the afternoon. – DAVID ADAMS
