Hans Danuser

Hans Danuser (born in 1953 in Chur) is a Swiss artist and photographer. His first mayor work, the cycle In Vivo, brought him international fame, therein he broke several societal taboos with respect to genetic research and nuclear physics. Since the 1990s, in addition to his photographic studies, Danuser has focused increasingly on transdisciplinary (research) projects in the arts and sciences.

Hans Danusers work is regularly showcased in important solo and group exhibitions at home and abroad. He has been invited to contribute to international events such as the biennales in Venice and Lyon. He is one of the first photographer to have taken the conceptually compelling step of presenting his large-format tableaux on the floor in a museum exhibition. In the 1980s Danuser embarked on his cycle In Vivo, completing it in 1989. Contemporaneously he produced architectural photographs in the project Partituren und Bilder/Scores and Pictures. In 1990 Danuser won the competition for the large-scale design of the walls at the University of Zurich-Irchel, which led to the Institutsbilder (1992). He later completed another important project in an architectural context, the Schiefertafel Beverin (2000–2001).The Frozen Embryo Series, made in 1990s, a follow-up of In Vivo, also prefigured two ongoing works, The Erosion Project and Entscheidungsfindung – Decision taking.

After working in Zurich for the German advertising and fashion photographer Michael Lieb from 1972–1974, Danuser began experimenting with light-sensitive emulsion at the ETHZ Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. 1979–1989: work on the cycle In Vivo. 1980s and 1990s: working in Zurich and New York. 1986: Artist in residence in Los Alamos. Since the 1990s: large-format series of photographs as installations in space and transdisciplinary projects in the arts and sciences. Spring 2009: first Visiting Artist at the Centre for Studies in the Theory and History of Photography at the Institute of Art History of the University of Zurich and subsequently visiting professor at the ETH Zurich. Hans Danuser is primarily based in Zurich.

The Counting Out Rhymes project on the subject of Entscheidungsfindung – Decision taking (work in progress) involves video stations and art-in-architecture. Danuser is interested in the approaches and models used in taking decisions as a social and political instrument, ranging from mathematical theory to the practical counting-out rhymes of children. The rhymes – “a mixtum compositum of reason and imagination” – are as significant as mathematical formulae and physical laws inasmuch as they are grounded in “nonrational processes of taking decisions” and therefore reflect the fundamental structure of contemporary models of thought.

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