Sasha Huber’s exhibition, Out of This World, at Hippolyte Studio presents one of her most recent portraits, created as part of The Firsts, a series she began in 2017. Through this work, Huber pays homage to pioneering figures, both living and ancestral, from the African diaspora. The series examines historical and systemic racism and its debilitating effects on its members, underscoring why, even today, someone may still be “the first Black person” to achieve specific milestones across various fields and countries.

The portrait on display depicts mathematician Katherine Johnson (1918–2020), one of the first African-American women to work at NASA. Johnson’s calculations of orbital mechanics were essential to the success of space missions, including Apollo 11 in 1969. The portrait was created from a photograph courtesy of the NASA Langley Research Center and Johnson’s family. Huber  crafted it using a compressed-air staple gun—a technique she developed in 2004. Recognising its symbolic significance as a weapon, Huber uses this method to renegotiate unequal power dynamics, symbolically stitching wounds together. Each portrait in The Firsts series is rendered on black-painted acoustic board, a sound-muting material that reflects the often-silenced histories of her subjects.

Accompanying the portrait is a stop-motion video capturing Huber as she works on The Firsts – Katherine Johnson, set to Stars Among the Milky Way, a commissioned song by composer and musician Brandy Butler in collaboration with Luc Zimmerman. The video reveals Huber’s meticulous stapling process, which, paired with the poetic song, illustrates the entire creation of the portrait. Against the black board, the silver staples resemble star constellations, mapping out Johnson’s likeness in fine detail. Beside the portrait stands Huber’s wooden sculpture representing the moon—a piece from an earlier installation titled Space Race in 2018.

All the works in the exhibition were previously shown in Huber’s solo exhibition YOU NAME IT at the Ferme-Asile in Sion, Switzerland, earlier this year. The eponymous book, published by Mousse Publishing, is available in the gallery bookshop throughout the exhibition.

Sasha Huber (b. 1975, Uster, Switzerland) is a Helsinki-based, internationally recognised visual artist and researcher of Swiss-Haitian heritage. Her work explores the politics of memory, care, and belonging in relation to colonial residues left in the environment. Connecting history and the present, she engages with archival material in a layered creative practice encompassing performance-based reparative interventions, video, photography, and collaborations. Huber holds an MA in Visual Culture from Aalto University in Helsinki and is currently pursuing a practice-based PhD in artistic research at Zurich University of the Arts. She also works in a creative partnership with visual artist Petri Saarikko. From 2021 to 2024, her work has been touring under the title YOU NAME IT, circulated by The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto.

@sashahuber
www.sashahuber.com

The exhibition and artist’s work have been supported by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taike).

Sasha Huber
Out of This World
29 November – 22 December 2024
Hippolyte Studio