Louvre Acquires First Video Work by Mohamed Bourouissa

The Musée du Louvre has made a landmark acquisition: for the first time in its history, the museum has added a video artwork to its permanent collection. The piece, titled “Les 4 temps” (The 4 Seasons), was created by Algerian-born artist Mohamed Bourouissa. It offers a meditative visual portrait of the Tuileries Garden, exploring the cycles of time across the four seasons.

Installed in the Salle de la Chapelle, the work overlooks the garden and will be on view from October 22, 2025, to January 19, 2026.

The Louvre had previously invited Bourouissa to publish a new video each week via its Instagram channel over the course of a year — 52 short films capturing changing light, human presence, shadows, growth and decay. Later they merged that work into this singular immersive video piece, complete with soundscape and visual rhythms.

Curator Donatien Grau said: “We wanted, for the first time, to portray the Jardin des Tuileries in video — a living companion to the paintings in the museum, observing time itself.”

This move by the Louvre is more than symbolic — it marks a paradigm shift: the museum once built for classical painting now embraces moving images.

The decision legitimizes video and digital media as part of the same canon that houses the Mona Lisa. It signals that museums must evolve to reflect contemporary visual language.

For viewers and creators alike, this is an invitation: not to compete with painting, but to dialogue with it — to see video as painting in time, and painting as a frozen moment of motion.