EXHIBITION ART AS REPARATIVE INTERVENTION.

In 2008, Sasha Huber, a Swiss-Haitian multimedia visual artist based in Finland, began a project to challenge the problematic legacy of Swiss-American glaciologist and natural scientist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873).

Agassiz was a devout creationist who lectured on his belief in racial segregation, defended slavery and propagated the unfounded idea that races were different species. These racist ideas have been dignified and normalised through the commemorative naming of seven species and more than 80 places. Astonishingly, these include one on the surface of the moon, another on Mars and his audacious self-naming of a mountain in Switzerland - 'Agassizhorn'.

A solo exhibition titled 'You Name It' - which brings together a selection of Huber's artworks that act as challenges to historical, systematic and scientific racism - has been on display at the Autograph gallery in London since November 2022.

The exhibition has been curated around the question: who and what do we memorialise and how? Conceived as a touring show, its first manifestation was in Rotterdam in 2021, where it was simply billed as 'Sasha Huber: A Solo Exhibition'. It then moved to The Power Plant in Toronto in 2022, where it acquired its current title.

Swiss-Haitian artist Sasha Huber renegotiates colonial history in a stunning exhibition in London

Since November of 2022, the show has been based at Autograph, whose director Mark Sealy has long been concerned with western photographic practice being 'used as a tool for creating Eurocentric and violent regimes.' This abiding concern is evident in this exhibition.

In 1850, Agassiz commissioned the studio portraitist Joseph T Zealy to make a set of daguerreotypes of enslaved people on the Edgehill plantation in South Carolina. This included a Congolese man, Renty Taylor, and his daughter Delia, as well as five others.

Agassiz used the images to support his theory of the inferiority of certain ethnic groups. The subjects were required to pose naked for three full-length views: front, rear and side. These are thought to be the first photographs of enslaved people.

Huber's engagement with Agassiz began when she was invited by historian and activist Hans Fassler to join the 'Demounting Louis Agassiz' campaign. In 2008, Huber undertook a symbolic renaming of Agassizhorn. Accessing the mountain top by helicopter, she marked the summit with a plaque bearing a new place name, Rentyhorn, honouring the enslaved man pictured by Zealy. A film...