Emergency Room is a format created by the artist Thierry Geoffroy / Colonel that will be activated in Hanoi at the Vietnam University of Fine Arts in connection with the royal Danish state visit to Vietnam, November 2009.

Artists are thermometers that can measure and perceive dysfunctions in our society. Artists are experts of all perceptions. What they know or feel must reach the public opinion immediately: Now - before it is too late.

Through Emergency Room, artists can react to reality every day. In Emergency Room the public can have access to the artist's premonitions, suspicions, visions and collected evidences before it is too late. In Emergency Room artists evolve and develop new unexpected methods and forms.

Artists, burning to express themselves about the emergencies of today, join each other daily to display their work in the circular Emergency Room. Punctuality and deadlines are fundamental when yesterday's artworks daily at 12.15 pm is removed from the Emergency Room to give space to the artworks of today. This ritual of changing the exhibition is called: "The Passage". The artworks from yesterday and previous days are then exhibited in the "Delay Museum" beside the Emergency Room.

The Queen, Crown Prince and Crown Princess of Denmark will attend the Passage on November 3rd and engage in the following discussion with the artists.

In Hanoi, a large number of Danish and Vietnamese artists will participate and cooperate over the period of the exhibition.

The Emergency Room Format
Emergency Room is a format: when an art institution has agreed to host the Emergency Room format it is given the license to activate a local version of the format, adapted to the local surroundings and context. Other formats by Thierry Geoffroy include the format "Biennalist", "Critical Run and "Awareness Muscle" .

Emergency Room is also an international movement, like a caravan, and everywhere the format is actualized the community of Emergency Room Artists expands. Emergency Room has been successfully launched in New York, PS1 / MOMA; Berlin, Galerie Olaf Stueber; Denmark, Nikolaj Contemporary art center; Athens, Ileana Tounta Gallery; Italy , Napoli PAN Art Center; Paris, Galerie Taïss.

"Artists, audience and media have been fighting for weeks in order to get to see and participate in the new and innovating exhibition that with its "art of the news" puts the art institution itself to debate.

Reuters, The New Yorker and the TV-channel ABC News are some of the leading media that have brought the story about the original exhibition, and at P.S.1 more than a thousand visitors per day have been seeing it…" (Nikolaj M. Lassen, Weekendavisen, March 30th, 2007)


Emergency Room Hanoi is organized by the Danish Arts Agency and the Royal Danish Embassy in Hanoi.

Admission free