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Governments, financiers, and technological utopians have given up on the complex “real world” and built a simple “fake world”, claims Adam Curtis in HyperNoramlisation.
HyperNormalisation is a 2016 BBC documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. In the film, Curtis argues that since the 1970s, governments, financiers, and technological utopians have given up on the complex “real world” and built a simple “fake world” that is run by corporations and kept stable by politicians.
The term “hypernormalisation” is taken from Alexei Yurchak’s 2006 book Everything was Forever, Until it was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, about the paradoxes of life in the Soviet Union during the 20 years before it collapsed. A professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, he argues that everyone knew the system was failing, but as no one could imagine any alternative to the status quo, politicians and citizens were resigned to maintaining a pretence of a functioning society. Over time, this delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy and the “fakeness” was accepted by everyone as real, an effect that Yurchak termed “hypernormalisation”.
HyperNormalisation
director: Adam Curtis, Great Britain, 2016, 166 min
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Jan Zálešák
is an art theorist and historian, a pedagogue, and as a curator of group exhibitions, he deals with current tendencies in contemporary art, such as Romanticism (Re-romantic, Youth gallery, 2009/2010), returns to the past (Vzpomínky na budoucnost II, Brno House of Arts, 2013/2014) or representation of the crisis of the techno-capitalist society (Apocalypse Me, Gallery of Emil Filla, 2016). Besides curatorial work, Zálešák also deals with critical and theoretical writing. The Art of Cooperation book, which Zálešák published under the auspices of VVP AVU in 2011, became the most important publication.
