Anish Kapoor, the Louvre and Iraq

C-Curve, a new sculpture by Anish Kapoor, is stopping people cold in the Louvre's Khorsabad court. A curving, eight-foot high wall of highly-polished steel with a concave face, it confronts visitors as soon as they walk in the gallery's principal entrance. From the door, its looks like an ordinary (though very large) mirror, but when you move towards it, the reflected space spins upside-down, stretches and blurs. Only when you get quite close to the surface does everything fall back into place again. It's the sort of simple but startling experience that keeps your attention and has you slowly moving around to come to your grips with it.

Part of the Louvre's "Contrepoint" exhibition placing contemporary works alongside the Louvre's collections, Kapoor has parked C-Curve amid the museum's monumental Assyrian bas-reliefs. These works come from Sargon II's eighth-century BC palace in the vicinity of modern-day Mosul in Iraq. A bewildering, troubling and potentially nauseating experience, it's hard not to link the piece to the disaster of present-day Iraq. Only the ancient walls illustrating Assyrian life from three millenia ago seem to keep the whole space from tumbling down.