AN “unsanctioned performance” broke out at the British Museum yesterday as environmental campaigners stopped visitors from entering an exhibition sponsored by oil giant BP.

BP’s financial support of the Indigenous Australia exhibition was labelled “disturbing” by Aboriginal representatives who blame the firm for much of their communities’ dislodgement.

Activists staged an oil spill and a play telling the story of colonialism in Australia in the museum’s main hall.

Aboriginal author and academic Tony Birch said: “The involvement of organisations such as BP in the sponsorship of indigenous arts, history and culture is disturbing.

“It is also hypocritical.

“Our lands and cultures are under threat from multinational organisations, determined to extract selfish wealth from the earth, regardless of the environmental, emotional and cultural damage caused.

“BP has an appalling record of environmental degradation.

“If it was genuinely concerned with the welfare, sovereignty and intellectual knowledge of indigenous nations, at a global level, it would cease its insatiable thirst for extracting fossil fuels from the ground and poisoning our air with them.”

Leaders of the Dja Dja Wurrung people in central Victoria unsuccessfully took legal action against the British Museum in 2005 in a bid to return artefacts belonging to their rare bark art heritage.

Environmental group BP or not BP, which campaigns for an end to the oil group’s sponsorship of art, organised the day’s events.

Spokeswoman Jess Worth said: “It’s hard to imagine a more inappropriate and insensitive sponsor for this exhibition than BP.

“The company is driving the very climate change that is threatening indigenous communities around the world, while pushing to drill four offshore wells in Australia, deeper than Deepwater Horizon.”

The British Museum had not commented at the time of going to press.