Pursuit of Wonders

Andreas Zu?st (1947-2000) was fascinated by natural phenomena his whole life long. Even as a child he would stoically take note of the weather conditions three times a day. Later on, as a student of glaciology, he spent whole months at Thule in Greenland drilling ice cores-and shooting countless slides of his research work there. The resulting corpus of photographic material explores ice in a multitude of different forms and escapes determination, ranging from endless icescapes, freshly blown bright white snow, and ice crystals on a window to a glowing blue, a polar bear peering into the camera on an ice-covered beach, and an ice-bound research base camp under the light of the full moon. The opaque blue glow of ice (best viewed as originally presented in a slide show) epitomizes the otherworldly aura of these evocative images. The story of ice and that of a glaciologist's life and work are told separately in Pursuit of Wonders, but tied together by the prevailing atmosphere of a surreal journey through a world of ice, rounded out by contributions by the film maker Peter Mettler, who was a friend of Zu?st's, cultural studies scholar Verena Kuni as well as artists Jimena Croceri and Sarina Scheidegger.