Sasha Huber’s solo exhibition Agassiz (All) Over is open from January 10 to March 01 in Galleri Image, Aarhus, Denmark. Galleri Image was the first gallery in Scandinavia specialised in Photography.

AGASSIZ (ALL) OVER by Sasha Huber is an exhibition presenting a selection of her artistic contributions to the long-term project and activist campaign “Demounting Louis Agassiz” (which was founded by historian and activist Hans Fässler in 2007), focusing on her work in New Zealand and Switzerland. The project’s goal is to challenge the ongoing celebration of Swiss-born naturalist and glaciologist Louis Agassiz – an influential racist and pioneering thinker of apartheid. The focal point of AGASSIZ (ALL) OVER is the video piece Karakia – the resetting ceremony, in which Sasha Huber, accompanied by greenstone carver Mr. Jeff Mahuika (Kāti Māhaki, Poutini Kāi Tahu), unnames an Aotearoa New Zealand glacier, which had previously been named after Louis Agassiz. This “unnaming” is reminiscent of one of the first actions of protest in the campaign, which revolved around the renaming of Agassizhorn, a mountain top in the Swiss alps, to Rentyhorn. The name-change was in honour of Renty, an enslaved man from Congo, who Agassiz commissioned the photographer Joseph T. Zealy to photograph in 1850, and the new name was emblematic of the silent and anonymous victims of racism. 

Alongside the Karakia video, AGASSIZ (ALL) OVER features a series of posters with the title Agassiz Down Under, which juxtapose archival photographs of a statue of Agassiz that has fallen on its head with the mission of “Demounting Louis Agassiz” campaign and facts about institutionalized racism. The exhibition will also display the ambrotype series Evidence, and the fictional lecture My racism is a humanism written by Agassiz scholar and “Demounting Louis Agassiz” committee member Hans Barth, and performed by the actor Thomas Götz, in which Agassiz attempts to vindicate himself and his theories.

Sasha Huber has worked with the “Demounting Louis Agassiz” campaign since 2008, and has continued the project in several other countries such as Brazil, Scotland, USA and Canada, where she has used her voice and body to mediate the ways in which the historic narrative was lacking. 

Sasha Huber: Agassiz (All) Over, January 10 – March 01 2020, Galleri Image, Aarhus, Denmark

More information: Galleri Image