Sasha Huber: YOU NAME IT - Autograph Gallery Exhibition Visit

Exhibition Details

• Sasha Huber: YOU NAME IT: https://autograph.org.uk/exhibitions/sasha-huber-you-name-it
• 11 Nov 2022 - 25 Mar 2023
• Free Exhibition
• Curated by Renée Mussai, Mark Sealy and Bindi Vora
• Location: Autograph, Rivington Place, London EC2A 3BA

Sasha Huber explores how colonial histories are imprinted into the landscape through naming and acts of remembrance - asking what actions it might take to repair the inherited traumas of history.

YOU NAME IT brings together over a decade of Huber’s work, prompted by the campaign Demounting Louis Agassiz. Initiated in 2007 by Swiss historian and activist Hans Fässler, the campaign seeks to redress the legacy of the Swiss-born glaciologist and racist Louis Agassiz (1807–1873). …At the heart of this exhibition is Tailoring Freedom, including portraits of Renty and Delia Taylor, an enslaved Congolese father and daughter whose portraits were forcibly taken by Zealy and used by Agassiz. 

These works are shown alongside Huber’s video, photography, performance and research unearthing Agissiz’s racist legacy, and efforts to remove his name from a mountain in the Swiss Alps and replace it with Renty’s – one of the goals of the Demounting Louis Agassiz campaign.

Huber’s desire to use art to heal colonial and historic traumas can be seen throughout the exhibition. The artist uses a staple gun to “symbolically stitch wounds together”.

http://www.sashahuber.com/

Renée Mussai is a London-based curator, writer and scholar with a special interest in Black feminist and queer Afrodiasporic visual practices. She is Senior Curator and Head of Collection at Autograph. Mussai lectures and publishes widely on photography, visual culture, and curatorial activism, and over the past two decades has organised numerous exhibitions in Europe, Africa and the US, including the critically acclaimed travelling installations ‘Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama’ (2017 – 2021) and 'Black Chronicles II – IV’ (2014 – 2018), amongst many other solo and group exhibitions. Her recent publications include the award-winning monograph Lina Iris Viktor: Some Are Born to Endless Night—Dark Matter (2020), and Care, Contagion, Community—Self & Other (2021, co-edited with Mark Sealy), and her forthcoming books include Eyes That Commit - Black Women and Non-Binary Photographers: A Visual Survey (Prestel, 2023); Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, Vol II (Aperture, 2023); and Black Chronicles (Autograph, 2023). Between 2009 - 2018, Mussai was a regular guest curator at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research Harvard University, USA, and non-resident fellow. In 2018 she joined the University of Johannesburg’s research centre VIAD (Visual Identities in Art and Design) as independent Research Associate; and since 2022 she serves as Artistic Advisor and Curatorial Consultant for The Walther Collection, a New York-based arts foundation. Mussai regularly lectures at the University of the Arts London where she is Associate Lecturer at the London College of Communication. 

Image: Sasha Huber, Tailoring Freedom – Renty and Delia, 2021. Metal staples on photograph on wood, 97 x 69 cm. Courtesy the artist and Tamara Lanier. Original images courtesy the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University (Renty, 35-5-10/53037; Delia, 35-5-10/53040).