Hans Danuser – Frost

During the 1980s, the Swiss photographer Hans Danuser’s (*1953) primary interest was in the power areas of contemporary society: gold refining, atomic research, vivisection, gene-technology and pathology. He seemed to be attracted to “Mephistophelian” areas where rare energies, values and knowledge are engendered and acquired at enormous expense: knowledge of our bodies and of the structure of the earth – knowledge to be used, in ignorance of the price that we pay for it. He worked within the classical formal framework of photography, selecting as his form the essay, which he subsequently exploited to its utmost limits in the laboratory.

Danuser’s new work – Frozen Embryo Series, Strangled Bodies and Erosions – opens up new vistas of photography and expands it into visual planes and landscapes: photography as a document and an image. Borderline situations are still the constant aim and interest of the researcher Hans Danuser: prenatal, post-mortem, or washed away – these are the “properties” that he seeks and finds. He turns his attention to a landscape of scientifically exploited ice, a landscape of eroded and alluvial soil, and a landscape of the maltreated body. And in them he discovers folds, congealment, frost.

The exhibition was curated by Urs Stahel.

Main sponsor: Winterthur Versicherungen