Art on the run a hotline to the public

A new exhibition called the Emergency Room puts artists under the pressure of daily deadlines to come up with topical new works in the ever-changing exhibition space at the Fine Arts University in Hanoi.
The exhibition would be characterised by a "tomorrow is too late" manifesto for non-apathetic artists who were burning to produce work that commented on the "emergencies of today," said Thierry Geoffoy, creator of the Emergency Room, or E.Room. The approach would encourage work involving news media, collages, and lots of textual elements. Geoffoy compared the role of an artist in the E.Room to that of a newspaper reporter.
Artists would have to bring their work to the E.Room by 12:15pm. The work has to reflect a burning issue of the day, requiring participating artists to follow the daily news in order to create an effective interaction between their media and public events.
Meanwhile, the previous day’s works are moved to a "delay museum" outside of the E.Room, to make room for the new works. The E.Room exhibition will take place for about a month.
The E.Room concept has already gather ed various artforms, such as photography, sculpture, graphic arts and video art, to exhibitions in Berlin, Athens, Copenhagen, London, San Francisco, Barcelona, Helsinki, Stockholm and now Hanoi.
New York City artist Gail Rothschild, who has participated in the E.Room, recalled, "The job at E.Room helped build my habit of reading the Times, Reuters, BBC, and AP and pay more attention to social issues."
But Geoffoy recognises that this concept may be more difficult to pull off in Vietnam.
"I see that some Vietnamese artists are still reserved and others don’t share the same viewpoints about art as us," he said." Not all artists are willing to open their hearts about social issues. One told me that he couldn’t hand in his work before 12.15pm because art needs time. But I hope that artists will learn how to do artwork like a professional ping-pong player with timely and sharp reactions."
The exhibition space is designed a circle, he said, in the hopes that artists, despite different opinions, would meet each other on the common ground of artistic creativity. Through E. Room, artists can react every day. They scan the emergencies of the day and respond to their discoveries of conflict or discrepancies.
By being a constantly changing exhibition space commenting on current events, the E. Room creates a hotline to the public and the mass media, with new reactions everyday and new reasons for exhibition goers to tune back in, Geoffoy said.
The exhibition runs through November 28 with the participation of 24 Vietnamese and Danish artists, including Le Tran Hau Anh, Tran Hau Yen The, Nguyen My Ngoc, Nguyen Thanh Hai, Nguyen Na Son and Nguyen Mai Ky. Hannah Christina Heilmann, Peter Lind and five other Danish artists will participate.
This event is being supported by the Danish Embassy as one of the cultural activities celebrating this week’s visit to Vietnam by the Danish Queen.