Emergency Room is a format for artists burning with desire to engage in the necessary debates. Emergency Room is an exhibition space where artists rank and express about emergencies today, today the present day, today before it is too late.
Artists are thermometers for dysfunctions of society. They are experts in detecting immediately, or even in advance, the broken arm. Artists spot dysfunctions and are asked to have solutions. What they feel or know has to be exhibited now. But in order to exhibit, an artist has to wait months or years in order to negotiate with art institutions, find funding and collaborators. This limits the artist urging to respond to the contemporary and leaves the art work as delayed comments on yesterday’s world.
Emergency Room is a format that permits immediate intervention as well as stimulating immediate debate with the public and distribution channels.
Through Emergency Room, artists can react every day and train collectively (as a group and with the public) their awareness muscle. By being an exhibition alive commenting on burning events, Emergency Room creates a proximity to the public and to the distribution channels, well exposing unreported dysfunctions and giving them attention. Everyday there will be new angles, follow ups, alarming discoveries, and everyday there will be new reasons for audience and media to tune back in.
The energetic force of Emergency Room pulls in artists with a burning desire to react to the contemporary. These are artists who share the questions and concerns of the public and have the pertinence to become valuable sources for the media as well (on some of the alarming issues media refuse total communication). In Emergency Room the participatory power of the debate involves both creator and viewers, an all are asked to become involved in the round room.
Emergency Room deliberately chooses to mix evidently different aesthetics; for instance cross-media artists with abstract painters or sculptors. Artists work in an environment where experimentation and artistic daring is not only welcome but encouraged. Artists evolve and develop new unexpected methods and art forms often resulting in significant changes in the praxis of participants and thereby in the aesthetics of the emergency art as such.
Emergency Room is an international movement and everywhere the format is actualized: from internationally acclaimed artists to local upcoming artists – all meeting each other under the clock, working together with a deadline and a rendez-vous. The format is encouraging artists to collaborate and become part of the energized community, a Vietnamese artist works with a Danish, a Polish with a Greek, a known artist with a younger one...