LENS.- The Gallery of Time is a unique space in the museum world. It allows visitors to take in 5,000 years of the history of art and humanity in a single pass, and has been a key component of the drive to innovate since the Louvre-Lens opened. In an open-plan space of some 3,000m2, the Gallery of Time brings artistic forms, technologies and civilisations together. It is an aesthetic and contemplative experience, a sensorial journey through the centuries and through creation.

The exhibition has always been accessible to all and free of charge, and is a major marker of the Louvre-Lens's commitment to opening up and sharing art and culture with as many people as possible.

As the year draws to a close, the Gallery of Time is honouring its original promise: to completely revamp the works on display in order to share the wealth of French national collections more widely.

Now more than two hundred masterpieces from the galleries of the Musée du Louvre are on display, and these have been further enhanced by loans from other major French national collections and complemented by invitations issued to contemporary artists.

This new selection of works is being presented on a stage that takes the form of a revisited and reimagined ‘River of Time’, on which visitors are free to navigate as they please. The layout is true to the Gallery's founding principles: visitors may wander through works of art, civilisations and history, and tease out the echoes between cultures.

This chronological journey, which starts with the invention of writing in the 4th millennium BCE and extends all the way up to the 19th century, has now been extended to include works from prehistoric times and contemporary perspectives.

This project is the fruit of more than ten years of encounters between the public and the museum's collections.

The new Gallery of Time is the result of an unprecedented outreach project, another hallmark of the Louvre-Lens’s mission. Each work now has a dual source of immediately accessible information: one in text, the other in graphic form. This means that each object on display can be explored in ways more suited to one's interests and learning preferences.

More than two hundred local residents were involved in the preparation of the graphic labels. Young people of all ages, from schools and universities, residents of old people's homes, representatives of civil society, carers and patients, people with disabilities, people in social integration schemes, neighbours, people already accustomed to museums and people who had never been to a museum before; each and every one shared their feelings and points of view about the works of art. Over 200 conversations with the works were interpreted by the illustrator Alexie Hiles and printed onto the graphic labels.

This collective approach embodies the ambition to present a new, shared Gallery of Time. It is a reinvented form of outreach, one that allows visitors to see, to understand and to feel these artworks, with the help of tools specifically designed to be accessible to all.