5TH URAL INDUSTRIAL BIENNALE OF CONTEMPORARY ART
Danilo Correale’s multidisciplinary practice offers critical yet poetic and playful reflections on the power mechanisms in late-capitalist control societies. Basing his projects on extensive research and collaborating with experts from a broad range of academic fields, Correale mobilizes art as a means of rendering visible the pressing issues that deeply affect us. Many of his works examine rest and leisure with the intention of politicizing them in the neo-liberal capitalist context where the forces of production relentlessly encroach on and erode individuals’ free time.
The installation Reverie — On the Liberation from Work (2017) is a continuation of Correale’s long-term investigations into the current capitalist structure. But it also takes it a step further by contemplating what might lie beyond it. Created in collaboration with a hypnotherapist, the work features a two-chapter guided hypnosis exercise aimed at deeply relaxing the viewer’s body and mind in preparation for a speculative future without work. The work calls into question the seeming “immortality” of late capitalist ideology, its lasting mechanisms, as well as the hyper-nor-malized notions of work, leisure, and freedom that it entails. For the artist, capitalism’s “immortality,” which defines life as perpetual productivity, must be overcome in order for humans to embrace a new future. The calming voice summons a utopian vision of a future world where automation leads to the liberation of humans from labor so that they can pursue individual development and fulfillment. The narrative frames personal time not as undesirable downtime, but as an inherent right of every human that must be defended against the realism painted by late capitalism.