Sasha Huber
Out of this World

This exhibition, presented for Moldejazz, brings together works by visual artist Sasha Huber from two distinct artistic projects: “Space Race” and “The Firsts”.

“The Firsts”, is an ongoing series she began in 2017 as a way of paying tribute to pioneering living and ancestral figures of the African diaspora. The series examines the enduring legacy of historical and systemic racism and its far-reaching effects, asking why, even today, individuals continue to become “the first Black person” to achieve milestones across diverse fields and in different parts of the world.

Huber creates her portraits using a compressed-air staple gun, a technique she developed in 2004. Conscious of the staple gun’s symbolic association with violence and power, she transforms it into a tool for renegotiating unequal power structures and imagining repair. The repetitive act of stapling becomes a symbolic gesture of stitching wounds together, mending histories that have been fractured or erased.

For “The Firsts”, Huber works on black-painted acoustic panels, a material typically used to absorb and mute sound. By repurposing this surface, she draws attention to the histories and voices of the people portrayed—stories that have too often been silenced or overlooked. The portrait in this exhibition depicts mathematician Katherine Johnson (1918–2020), one of the first African American women to work at NASA. Her groundbreaking calculations in orbital mechanics were instrumental to the success of numerous space missions, including the Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969. The portrait is based on a photograph from the NASA Langley Research Center and was created with the kind permission of Katherine Johnson’s family and NASA.

Accompanying the portrait is a stop-motion film documenting Huber’s creation of “The Firsts – Katherine Johnson (2023)”. The film features the commissioned song Stars Among the Milky Way, composed by Brandy Butler in collaboration with Luc Zimmerman. Huber’s meticulous stapling process unfolds alongside the poetic soundtrack, revealing the gradual emergence of Johnson’s likeness. Against the black surface, the silver staples evoke constellations of stars, mapping both Johnson’s portrait and her extraordinary contribution to the exploration of space.

“Space Race” examines how racist histories continue to shape the present and future through practices of naming, extending from Earth into outer space. The project explores Sasha Huber’s ongoing efforts to challenge the commemoration of the 19th-century Swiss glaciologist Louis Agassiz (1807–1873), whose name has been assigned to numerous geographical features on Earth, the Moon, and Mars. Agassiz’s scientific work promoted racist theories, including polygenism, racial hierarchy, and opposition to racial mixing.

More than 80 sites and seven animal species bear Agassiz’s name. For over a decade, Huber has contributed to the Demounting Louis Agassiz campaign, initiated by historian and political activist Hans Fässler, which advocates renaming the Agassizhorn in the Swiss Alps.

Space Race invites viewers to reconsider the politics of commemoration by asking: What does a name preserve, and whose histories does it privilege? It further questions whether the naming of extraterrestrial landscapes reproduces colonial logics, extending systems of symbolic possession beyond Earth.

Sasha Huber is a Helsinki-based visual artist of Swiss-Haitian heritage. She 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. Her work has been presented in numerous solo exhibitions, including at Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam (2021); The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto (2022); Autograph, London (2022); and the Turku Art Museum, Turku (2023). Her work has also featured in major international exhibitions, including the São Paulo Biennial (2010), Sydney Biennale (2014), Venice Biennale (2015), and Helsinki Biennial (2023), as well as exhibitions at Aargauer Kunsthaus (2023), Kunsthaus Zürich (2024), and Ferme-Asile, Sion (2024).
Her achievements have been recognised with several distinctions, including the State Art Prize of Finland in 2018. Since 2022, she has held a multi-year Artist’s Grant from the Arts Promotion Centre Finland (2022–2026).
This exhibition is curated by Jet Pascua, the artistic director of MRK, and it is made possible in collaboration with, and support from the Molde International Jazz Festival. The artist also received support from the Taiteen edistämiskeskus (Art Promotion Centre Finland).