Danilo Correale: Living Dead Time – Announcements

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark, is proud to announce its second exhibition at the former Sct Psychiatric Hospital. Hans in Roskilde, where it will continue to develop its exhibition program until 2026. The museum opens the exhibition on May 18th Living dead time by the Italian artist Danilo Correale, his first solo exhibition in Scandinavia.

Living dead time
A blue light illuminates the window panes in the Central Store House, the raw industrial building at the heart of the former Sct psychiatric hospital. Hans, in Roskilde, Denmark. It is the splendor of the exhibition Living dead time with Italian artist Danilo Correale, who transforms the industrial space into a scenic office installation, a speculative dreamscape about a future without work, and an in-depth examination of sleep and wakefulness. The audience is invited to join in the artist’s exploration of our hyper-productive society, challenging the urge to constantly perform and optimize time.

Danilo Correale’s practice emphasizes and rethinks the meaning of what we do when we are not working. Focusing on the politics of sleep and the crisis of leisure, the show speculates and offers new perspectives on what is often seen as unproductive and examines the value of inactivity as an act of refusal.

Leisure as an intangible cultural heritage
First, visitors enter a staged conference environment. Here, the project Leisure time (constantly) unfolds through an interplay of media, a keynote presentation and a copy of an official application (form ICH-01) proposing the inclusion of leisure on UNESCO’s list of urgent protective measures. Through this collaborative work, Correale expands this proposal with an installation focused on a questionnaire that involves the audience in a reflection on the value of leisure. The answers will contribute to Correale’s further research and development of the project.

In his four-hour sensory visual essay No more sleep, no more sleep (2016/2024), specially revised for the exhibition at Sct. Hans, Correale explores the social and anthropological meaning of sleep in postmodernity. Collaborating with scholars from diverse fields such as feminist studies, sociology, and philosophy, Correale examines sleep as a complex phenomenon tied to the history of capitalism and how our perceptions of alertness and productivity have changed over time. The work chronicles the history of human relationships with the nightspace from industrialization to the dematerialization of the workplace.

In the series Eerie drawings (2020), Correale plays with vignettes from psychiatry: associative exercises for interpreting the psychological state and thought patterns of patients. Sinister means “forsaken” in Latin and is often used to describe something that is outside the norm, or even evil itself. With his left and non-dominant hand, Correale marks the vignettes with incomplete abstract answers, using the diagnostic tool turns it on its head, resists categorization and pathologizes human behavior and thinking.

A future without work
Finally, visitors can sit back and enter the hypnotic sound installation Reverie, about freedom from work (2017), entering an uncertain and different future in which there may be no more work. In this visualization, which borrows language from the radical history of work refusal, we can imagine a world without obligations and think about what the ideal division of our work, free time and sleep might look like now – and in the future.

Public program
As part of Living dead time As part of the discursive program, a panel with film director Eric Gandini, professor of gender, technology and cultural policy Helen Hester and artist Danilo Correale will take place on June 13th in the exhibition space (the Central Store House), moderated by Christian Skovbjerg Jensen Sankt Hans, Roskilde.

Living dead time is curated by Christian Skovbjerg Jensen, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art.

The Museum of Contemporary Art
The Museum of Contemporary Art in Denmark (founded in 1991) is a nomadic and changing museum based in Roskilde. The museum is dedicated to ephemeral and time-based art forms such as performance, sound and video. Since 2023, the museum has been temporarily located in the former Sct psychiatric clinic. Hans presents an exhibition program with a focus on mental health, nursing and psychiatry.