EXHIBITION: THE GREATEST EMERGENCY

Zabala was invited to curate an exhibition based on his book Why Only Art Can Save Us. Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency (Columbia University Press) at the prestigious Circulo de Bellas Artes of Madrid. The inauguration will take place on October 24th, at 7 pm, and the exhibition will last three months, until January 12, 2025. This exhibit aims to present to the public eleven works of art by contemporary artists that strive to save us, that is, “rescue us into our greatest emergencies” before they become “emergencies.” 

This emergency aesthetics theory does not imply that a crisis such as the coronavirus or the wars in Ukraine and Gaza are not fundamental emergencies that we must continue to confront at all levels. It simply demands that we avoid pretending these were unpredictable events that we didn’t know would occur. The coronavirus, for example, was an “absent” and “great” emergency that lasted for many years and became an emergency. Sociologists, scientists, and international organizations have warned us for decades of the threat of pandemic influenza. The same is occurring now with air pollution, which is responsible for the deaths of seven million people every year. The more an emergency is absent the greater it is. 

The ten works of art presented at the exhibition will rescue us into great (absent) emergencies such as climate change, increasing inequality, gender violence, and many more issues concealed by the rhetoric of the global return to order, populism, and autocrats we are experiencing now. On this page, we will post press releases, articles, photos, and videos of the exhibition.