For the academic year 2010/11, Hans Danuser joins the Collegium Helveticum as an Affiliated Fellow. Before he has been visiting professor at the Collegium Helveticum, ETH Zurich, in the field of art and photography. His work was focused on the research and definition of enriching cross-border encounters as a model for the sciences and the arts.
After working as an assistant to Zurich-based German advertising and fashion photographer Michael Lieb in the early 1970s, Danuser began to experiment with light-sensitive emulsion at the Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. In 1980 he started his «IN VIVO» cycle which was completed in 1989 and comprises seven series of pictures. The 93 black-and-white photographs probe taboos that prevailed in the research and power centres of the industrial society in Europe and the USA prior to the fall of the Berlin wall, the realignment of superpowers and the rise of globalization. Areas that influence and change the development of our society continue to be Hans Danuser's main concern in the large-format works that followed, also presented in site-specific exhibitions and as installations like FROZEN EMBRYO SERIES 1996–2000 and EROSION 2000–2006.
Hans Danuser is based primarily in Zurich and New York. His works are represented in public and private collections, including Kunsthaus Zurich, Bündner Kunstmuseum, the Howard Stein collection, New York, the George Reinhart collection and Fotomuseum Winterthur, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Walter A. Bechtler collection, Zurich, and Aargauer Kunsthaus.
In addition to his position as a Guest Professor at the Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, ETH, and at the Swiss Institute for Art Research at the University of Zurich /KHIST UZH, Hans Danuser lectured and participated in symposiums, among others, at Jan van Eyk Academy, Maastricht; Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig; School of Art and Design, Zurich; University of Zurich, Collegium Helveticum at the ETH and the University of Zurich, at Academy Tutzing Munich and Humboldt University, Berlin.
In the academic year 2009/10 Hans Danuser created the «Kunst in Architektur»-Project «Ein Colloquium der Dinge» in the foyer of the Collegium Helveticum. A publication about this project is available.