Daniel Knorr. Dip in the past

About

Daniel Knorr (*1968 in Bucharest, lives and works in Berlin) readdresses historical, sociopolitical, economic, and biopolitical issues, taking conceptual and often participatory approaches. The materializations of his multlayered concepts take place in very different practices. Examples are his contributions to the latest documenta (documenta 14 in 2017), in which he had white smoke rise from the Zwehrenturm tower in his work Expiration Movement and portrayed the art business as a never-resting factory, though the image also had historical associations particularly at this place. In Athens, on the other hand, he acted as a contemporary archeologist collecting objects left on the city’s streets, which he subsequently pressed into books before the eyes of the audience and archived. As a result, he gave them a different value without omitting the link to the current issue of environmental pollution and waste problems in the industrial age. Always focusing on history-making phenomena, coupled with current discourse, Daniel Knorr deals in his work with prevailing conditions with both humor and seriousness.

For the exhibition on Gallery Weekend 2019 in Meyer Riegger’s new gallery rooms on Schaperstraße/Joachimsthaler Straße, Daniel Knorr will show current, in part site-specific works in which he investigates, in keeping with the title “Dip in the past,” issues revolving around ephemerality, historiography, and the construction of the past. Additionally, new works from his series Depression Elevations, which he began in 2013, will be on view. In performative actions he takes casts of potholes from historic places and as a reaction to them creates pigmented polyurethane casts, which he recontextualizes as brightly colored wall sculptures.