Emergency Rooms Manifeste

Emergency Room is a launch pad for artists burning with desire not to only engage in the current debate but to create artwork with consequences. It is an exhibition space where artists comment on the emergencies of today, today the present day, today before it is too late.

Artists are thermometers for dysfunctions of society. They are visual experts. But in order to exhibit, an artist has to wait months or years in order to negotiate with art institutions, find funding and colaborators. This limits the artist urging to respond to the contemporary and leaves the art work as delayed comments on yesterday’s world. The contemporary is a flea market.

Emergency Room’s heart is a room where non apathetic artists run to express about emergencies of today. They scan those emergencies and respond to their discoveries of conflicts and discrepancies .  The Emergency Room is updated every day and has the important position of beeing able to interfer in actual politics and emergencies (for example before laws are voted).

The quality or aesthetic of the exhibitions is not important here. The importance lies in the possibility to show art immediately. For example, visual artists working with video re-edit and thus make new version of the TV news ; artists working with photo reorganise the iconography of newspapers to provide another angle, some just scan the street were they are living. Visitors to the gallery can see a new version of the newspaper they have just read, or of the TV’s breaking news that they have just seen. An artistic version, something that on purpose was not shown in the mass medias, something very important. Visitors should experience a new vision of what is normally offered to them, a new perception of the world’s actual situation.

I believe that installation artists have important statements to make. I believe that we have to give them a voice in real time. Politicians use visual communication more and more. The visual artist is a specialist in decoding and synthesising visual material and is strongly able to bring us a new version of what is really going on. This is why I believe that art institutions should open Emergency Rooms everywhere in the world. I am sure that some evidence or even human sensuality will be brought into focus for museums’ visitors.

Emergency Room is an art format by Thierry Geoffroy / Colonel

http://www.emergencyrooms.org/

Emergency Room has been successfully launched in New York, PS1/MOMA; Berlin, Galerie Olaf Stueber; Denmark, Nikolaj Contemporary; Athens, Ileana Tounta Gallery and is currently planned for Napoli, PAN and Paris Galerie Taďss Paris ( nov. and dec. 2008 ).