Sunday, September 12, 2021

Sasha Huber challenging racism with Rentyhorn in Toronto


Work from artist Sasha Huber is appearing at The Power Plant starting in early January 2022 but you can see her photo 'Rentyhorn' on the exterior south wall of the Harbourfront gallery now.

From Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival website; "Sasha Huber’s multidisciplinary practice investigates colonial residue in the environment, highlighting the ways in which history is imprinted in the landscape through acts of remembrance. Rentyhorn (2008) documents a reparative intervention led by the Helsinki-based artist to rename the Agassizhorn, an Alpine peak named after Swiss-American glaciologist and “scientific” racist Louis Agassiz (1807–73). The mural captures Huber looking out over the Agassizhorn while holding a plaque arguing for the mountain’s renaming—a reminder that the gallery site is also embedded with colonial histories."

You can check out Sasha Huber's solo exhibition 'YOU NAME IT' at the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery January 29 till May 8, 2022.
From the artist's website describing the motivation for Rentyhorn; "As a member of the Transatlantic Committee “De-mounting Louis Agassiz”, I made the following intervention. I carried a metal plaque bearing a graphic representation of the slave Renty to the top of an Alpine peak, the Agassizhorn (3946 metres), on the borders of the Swiss cantons of Berne and Valais. In so doing, I took the first step towards renaming the mountain. This act commemorates the fact that the Swiss-born naturalist and glaciologist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) was an influential racist and pioneering thinker of apartheid, and that the Agassizhorn should be renamed the “Rentyhorn” in honour of the Congolese-born enslaved Renty, and of those who met similar fates. Agassiz ordered Renty to be photographed on a South Carolina plantation, “to prove the inferiority of the black race”."

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