Sasha Huber: YOU NAME IT

Less well known, however was Agassiz’s legacy of ‘scientific’ racism, an ideology that includes resistance to Darwinian evolution, creationism, miscegenation – or the suppression of interracial marriage, cohabitation, and procreation – and the creation of racial hierarchies. Intent on proving the alleged inferiority of black people, he commissioned J.T. Zealy (1812-1893) to photograph enslaved people on the Edgehill plantation in South Carolina in March of 1850, using the technology of photography to further his eugenics campaign.

Huber’s desire to use art to heal colonial and historic traumas can be seen throughout the exhibition. Foregrounded in the centre of the gallery in an open-ended enclave is Tailoring Freedom (2021-ongoing) depicting Renty and Delia Taylor, an enslaved Congolese father and daughter whose portraits were forcibly taken by Zealy and used by Agassiz. Huber reproduced Zealy’s daguerreotypes onto wood and used her signature staple gun method – a technique she has developed since 2004, combining both facets of her practice for the first time – to ‘dress’ Renty in a suit worn by Frederick Douglas (1818-1895), and Delia in a ‘dress’ worn by Harriet Tubman (1849-1913), honouring the contributions of both abolitionists. The artist uses the staple gun to symbolically stitch wounds together, creating reflective and three-dimensionally appearing ‘pain-things’: asking not only who and what we memorialise, but also, and more importantly emphasising how we practice this. This technique can also be seen in The Firsts – Tilo Frey, commemorating the Cameroonian-Swiss politician who campaigned for women’s rights and suffrage in Switzerland; and in Khadija Saye: You Are Missed, honouring the late artist, activist and carer who tragically died alongside her mother in the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017.

Huber’s artworks present a vision for the ways we can tenderly, and with care, refute the damage already inflicted by history. In challenging the terms by which we remember, the artist asks who and what we memorialize, and more importantly, how we do so. The exhibition at Autograph continues in our Gallery 2 space with a series of film works.