In case of emergency

In Case of Emergency was a solo-exhibition at the Art Gallery of Mississauga about preparing for emergency and how, as a collective exercise in imagining futures, it shapes relationships in the present. It brought together a series of new photographs with workshops and a gallery-installation.

From the exhibition text:

Emergencies, as they are commonly understood, are sudden, turbulent events that interrupt the routines of everyday life: floods, fires, storms, earthquakes—urgent situations demanding quick action against threats to safety and property. However, there are other types of emergency; situations that arrive gradually and escalate slowly, or those that are quiet and visible only to those suffering their effects. In any case, an emergency (as the word itself tells us) involves an “emergence” of something disruptive and alarming that changes our accustomed reality and the terms of our survival.

 

Prompted by Mississauga’s own brush with emergency — more than 200,000 people were rapidly evacuated away from a chemical spill after the Mississauga Train Derailment of 1979 and disaster was narrowly but effectively avoided — In Case of Emergency looks at the idea of emergency and our relationship to it as future event. Planning for emergency events is an important, practical action but it is also an exercise in imagination; it requires dreaming up unknown possibilities and then acting on those speculative scenarios. How does the process of preparing for emergencies act in the present? How can it bring people together or push them apart? How can an imagined future event realign current priorities, reconsider our relationships to people and place, or attune us to the emergencies we are already amidst?

 

As human activity increasingly interrupts the planet’s systems, we can expect to encounter increasingly more emergencies. How do we plan for these looming possibilities?