Trams and Institutions, 2007

Materialization
Four regular trams used for public transportation covered with the corporate identity of several public institutions: the army, the Orthodox Church, the Red Cross, the police Spatiul Public Bucuresti | Public Art Bucharest

For one month, four trams of the regular public transportation service in Bucharest, Romania, were decorated using the corporate identity of the most important institutions in the state, including the Romanian army, the Orthodox Church, the Red Cross, and the police. The trams ran on regular tramlines throughout the city between September 15 and October 15, 2007. A series of photographs, films, and interviews was created during that time. In blogs, newspaper articles, and conversations, the public reacted with astonishment and bewilderment to the fact that state institutions had been transformed into service providers.

Daniel Knorr born 1968 in Bucharest, lives and works in Berlin and Hong Kong.

Daniel Knorr's conceptual, often participatory approaches repeatedly raise the issue of historical, socio-political, economic and biopolitical phenomena in the context of art. In different genres he appropriates, transfers and materializes states of past, present and future. Thus, Knorr provides equestrian statues with balaclavas (Copenhagen 2009), sets up beggar robots in museums and public spaces (Wien 2012) or constructs a smoker's cab for the showroom of a museum (Bremen 2012).

Since 2012, the wall sculptures of his series Depression Elevations have been made from casts of uneven road surfaces or other surfaces in colored, semi-transparent polyurethane. During the 14th Documenta 2017, Daniel Knorr launched White's Expiration Movement, 10 hours daily and 163 days out of the tower above Kassel, while in Athens he was commissioned as a contemporary archaeologist, placing objects left on the streets whose impressions he pressed into books in front of the Documenta audience. Daniel Knorr negotiates a wide variety of realities and relationships, equally with humor and sincerity: he lets contours fade, contour or shine through them.