Conceptual artist Daniel Schürer follows a ‘hospitable’ concept of art, for which he transforms empty shopping arcades, smokehouses, stairwells, hop kilns, railway stations, multi-storey car parks, barracks, stables, publishing houses and much more into vital art venues for an (indefinite) period of time, based on his first art space Via113 (founded in 1993 in a former shoemaker’s shop).
The audience permutates from the role of viewer to guests and participants in his interventions; lingering and coming together are the yardsticks of his mostly installative and expansive mixed-media-interventions. These address the public as a monastery, dance floor, restaurant, café or hotel, music club, radio station, newspaper publisher or fictitious company, such as the Schürer & Töchter Shipbuilding Company. These temporarily established art spaces or scenarios are used to negotiate social themes ‘such as “nothingness”, “community”, “togetherness” and, associated with this, “togetherness” ‘against each other’, occasionally in words, often playfully,’ writes the artist.
Since the early 1990s, he has been acting in an almost performative manner from his art association Via113 in Hildesheim as the founder and operator of a wide variety of media-formats, which are art associations in the broadest but also narrowest sense – and has nomadically set up ‘outposts’ in Germany (Hildesheim, Heudeber-Danstedt, Bonn, Weimar, Hanover, Munich, Bad Ems, etc.) as well as throughout Europe (Porto, Brussels, Skye, Banska Stiavnica, Luxembourg-City, etc.), some of which have been in operation for decades, to now ‘supply’ peripheral locations in the small village of Reusten (Neckar-Alb region, 14 km from Tübingen) culturally with the Süddeutscher Kunstverein and the Bergcafé, to realise its artistic and curatorial offerings in and with the region.
Schürer’s approach can also be read as humanistic; his ability and willingness to mediate manage to address the thoroughly complex references of his work without marginalisation, so that the openings of his extensive projects sometimes resemble folk festivals, where guests close to and distant from art, young and old (accompanied by simple, extremely tasty food) come together.
The restless, modest and approachable cultural-worker Schürer will transform the art space for the duration of his project, whether into a club, an inn or a hostel, whether into a laboratory for colleagues, an association or even a company. But perhaps a monastery, his monastery, ‘Mosteiro Schuerer’, as the title of the project suggests. It is elementary for him to stay at the site of his activity, to live there, to offer a programme, to invite colleagues, to work together with the people in the surrounding area, to come into contact, to generate community, to endure silence. The fact is that the guests and visitors to his projects are made to feel welcome and there are indications of how far the statement ‘holistic artistic action’ extends, how art and life go together, ‘how failure and success can be perceived differently’, according to the artist. The project makes it possible to see and experience how differently the Kunstverein model can be practised and what results this commitment can produce in personal union.
Having already visited Munich in 2006 for the exhibition ‘Faith and Knowledge’ at the Galerie der Künstler:innen with ‘Via113 zu Gast in München’ in 2006, Schürer will once again be a guest of the city and host at Kunstraum München almost 20 years later with ‘Mosteiro Schürer’.
