In 2022, museums became the arena for the most pressing issue of our time – the climate debate – to warn about the effects of global warming. A warning that scientists have been issuing for years: an increase of the world’s climate by over 1.5 degrees that will throw nature off balance globally. Yet most people can’t seem to grasp the significance of this data and what will happen if the global climate rises just a few degrees more.

To show that just a few degrees more can turn the world into an uncomfortable place, we tilted the Leopold Museum’s world-famous landscape paintings by the exact amount of degrees that temperatures will rise in the regions they depict.

Together with scientists, meteorologists and climatologists from the Climate Change Centre Austria, the country's leading institution for climate effect research, we calculated the impact of a global increase in temperatures and translated the degrees in temperature into degrees of angles and then tilted the museum’s celebrated landscape paintings by the exact amount of degrees that temperatures will rise in the regions they depict. The campaign is an innovative contribution to make abstract scientific data intuitively and vividly comprehensible and to confront people with an uncomfortable truth in a completely new context. In the surroundings of a museum of world renown in the heart of Vienna, we reached a broader audience and obtained a deeper involvement with the subject matter than a climate report or environmental study would.

Together with leading researchers from the Climate Change Centre Austria we calculated the impact of a global increase in temperatures.

We then tilted the museum’s landscape paintings by the exact amount of degrees that temperatures will rise in the regions they depict.

For a week we left visitors guessing, then we revealed our intervention on prime-time national TV – on the exact day the UN climate report was published.

Corresponding to the tilted paintings, educational labels led to our website where further information and ways to take action were provided.

Without a single printed poster or other advertising material, we turned invaluable artworks into educational warning signs of climate change.

With zero media budget we reached a global audience of millions in only a few weeks.

The museum now offers guided climate tours with art and climatology experts to visitors and school classes.

After a week of leaving visitors guessing, we revealed our intervention on prime-time national TV – on the exact day the UN climate report was published.

By tilting celebrated artworks by famed masters – worth hundreds of millions – we turned them into warning signs of a nature in imbalance and reached a broader audience for this difficult but highly relevant topic.

The press from all over the world picked up the story almost immediately. Media outlets such as abc News, The Washington Post, Agence France Press, Reuters, China Daily, Japan News, Forbes, Süddeutsche Zeitung and many more featured the campaign in their coverage in print, online and on TV.

Thus, a simple twist translated abstract data into an art installation, generated around 540 million media impressions in only 3 weeks with almost zero budget and changed people’s perspectives on the effects of a few degrees more.