Danilo Correale: Living Dead Time

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark, is proud to announce its second exhibition in the former psychiatric hospital, Sct. Hans in Roskilde, where it will continue to unfold its exhibition program until 2026. On May 18 the museum opens the exhibition Living Dead Time by Italian artist Danilo Correale, which is 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 psychiatric hospital, Sct. Hans, in Roskilde, Denmark. It is the glow from the exhibition Living Dead Time featuring the Italian artist Danilo Correale, who transforms the industrial spaces into a scenic office installation, a speculative dreamscape about a future without work and an in-depth study of sleep and wakefulness. The audience is invited to join the artist’s exploration of our hyper-productive society, challenging the drive to constantly perform and optimize time.

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

Free time as intangible cultural heritage
First, visitors step into a staged conference environment. Here, the project Free Time (ongoing) unfolds through an interplay of media, a keynote presentation and a copy of an official application (form ICH-01) proposing the enrollment of Free Time into the UNESCO Urgent Safeguarding List. Through this collaborative work Correale expands on this proposal with an installation centered on a questionnaire that engages the audience in a reflection on the value of free time. The answers will be a contribution to Correale’s continued research and development of the project.

In his four-hour-long sensorial visual essay, No More Sleep No More (2016/2024), specifically reworked for the exhibition at Sct. Hans, Correale explores the social and anthropological significance of sleep in postmodernity. Collaborating with academics from different fields such as feminist studies, sociology and philosophy, Correale examines sleep as a complex phenomenon, entangled with the history of capitalism and how our perception of wakefulness and productivity has changed over time. The work chronicles the history of human relationships with the night space from industrialization to the dematerialization of the workspace.

In the series Sinister Drawings (2020), Correale plays with vignettes borrowed from psychiatric care: associative exercises designed to interpret the mental condition and thought patterns of patients. Sinister means left in Latin and is often used to describe that which falls outside the norm, or even evil itself. With his left and non-dominant hand, Correale marks the vignettes with incomplete abstract responses, turning the diagnostic tool inside out, resisting categorization and pathologizing human behavior and thought.

A future without work
Finally, visitors can lean back and enter the hypnotic sound installation Reverie, on the Liberation from Work (2017), entering an uncertain and different future, where work may no longer exist. In this visualization, borrowing the language from the radical history of the refusal of work, we are free to imagine a world without obligations and consider how the ideal breakdown of our work, free time, and sleep can look like now – and in the future. 

Public program
As part of Living Dead Time discursive program, a panel featuring film director Eric Gandini, professor of gender, technology and cultural politics Helen Hester, and the artist Danilo Correale, moderated by Christian Skovbjerg Jensen will be held on June 13 in the exhibition space (the Central Store House) at Sankt Hans, Roskilde.

Living Dead Time is curated by Christian Skovbjerg Jensen, director at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

The Museum of Contemporary Art
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark (est. 1991), is a nomadic and shapeshifting 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 operating temporarily at the former psychiatric hospital, Sct. Hans, presenting an exhibition program that focuses on mental health, care, and psychiatry.