Swiss-Haitian-Finnish artist Sasha Huber uses performance, photography, and film, among other media, to investigate colonial residues left in the environment. Her projects conceive of natural spaces – mountains, lakes, glaciers, forests, and craters – as contested territories, highlighting the ways in which history is imprinted onto the landscape through acts of remembrance, including memorialisation through naming and the erection of monuments.
After debuting at The Power Plant (Toronto), Autograph (London) and Turku Art Museum (Finland), Sasha Huber: YOU NAME IT is touring to Ferme-Asile in Switzerland. The exhibition will feature over a decade’s worth of work by the artist, prompted by the activist campaign Demounting Louis Agassiz, which seeks to redress the racist legacy of the Swiss- born naturalist and glaciologist Louis Agassiz (1807–1873). 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 memorialise, and more importantly, how we do so.
How do you repair the scientific racism embedded in the history of science?
Hyperallergicis a Helsinki-based, multidisciplinary visual artist-researcher of Swiss-Haitian heritage. Sensitive to the subtle threads connecting history and the present, she uses and responds to archival material within a layered creative practice that encompasses performance-based interventions, video, photography, and collaborations.
Huber frequently reclaims – aware of its symbolic significance – the compressed-air staple gun as an artistic ‘weapon’, tapping into its potential to renegotiate unequal power dynamics. She is known for her artistic research contribution to the Demounting Louis Agassiz campaign which aims to dismantle the glaciologist’s lesser-known but contentious racist heritage. Huber also often works in a creative partnership with artist Petri Saarikko with whom she initiated the long-term project Remedies Universe.
Huber holds an MA in visual culture from the Aalto University and is presently undertaking a practice-based PhD at Zurich University of the Arts. Huber has had numerous solo presentations, artist residencies and participated in international exhibitions and festivals, including the 56th Venice Biennial in 2015. In 2021 Huber’s solo exhibition tour YOU NAME IT began at Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam and continues to The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto; Autograph in London in 2022/23; and Turku Art Museum in Finland in 2023. In 2018 Huber was the recipient of the State Art Award in the category visual arts given by the Arts Promotion Center Finland.
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Find out moreAutograph is a place to see things differently. Since 1988, we have championed photography that explores issues of race, identity, representation, human rights and social justice, sharing how photographs reflect lived experiences and shape our understanding of ourselves and others.
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