BLACK MEME: Book launch
English
Book launch: BLACK MEME
We warmly welcome you to the Helsinki launch of BLACK MEME, with author Legacy Russell joining in-person for a round-table discussion with artist Sasha Huber and curator and philosopher Päiviö Maurice Omwami.
Black Meme: A History of the Images that Make Us (Verso, 2024) is a new publication by Legacy Russell. It analyses images of Blackness and their circulation through frameworks of feminism, visual culture and Black studies. The book traces the virality of images of Black life and its violent annihilation, from the birth of photography and cinema in the late nineteenth century, all the way up to online culture today.
Legacy Russell is a curator and writer based in New York City. She is the Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen, NYC’s oldest experimental intermedia gallery. Formerly she was the Associate Curator of Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Their academic, curatorial, and creative work focuses on gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new media ritual.
Sasha Huber is a multidisciplinary artist who activates and intervenes upon colonial residues. From 2021–24 her solo exhibition “You Name It” toured internationally.
Päiviö Maurice Omwami is a curator at the Finnish Museum of Photography who researches race and racism, particularly from the perspective of whiteness.
Round-table takes place at Permantosali on Saturday 1st March 17.30 - 19.00. Following the round-table Legacy Russell and Sasha Huber will sign copies of their publications for sale at the Pp. bookstore, adjacent to Bar tÿpo where the reception takes place.
The event is kindly supported by Taike, Finnish Cultural Institute in New York and Museum of Impossible Forms, as part of a program of events on Black Meme curated and produced by Helen Kaplinsky and Vishnu Vardhani Rajan.
Biographies:
Legacy Russell (she/they) is a curator and writer. Born and raised in New York City, she is the Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen. Formerly she was the Associate Curator of Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Their academic, curatorial, and creative work focuses on gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new media ritual. Russell’s written work, interviews, and essays have been published internationally. She is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation 2019 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency Fellow, and a recipient of the 2021 Creative Capital Award. Her first book is Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020). Her second book, BLACK MEME, is published with Verso Books.
Päiviö Maurice Omwami is a curator and philosopher who works as an exhibition curator at the Finnish Museum of Photography. In addition to working in the fields of photography and culture, Omwami researches race and racism, particularly from the perspective of whiteness. Critical philosophy of race, postcolonial theory, and afropessimism, as well as research on structural oppression and political theory, are among Omwami's key areas of interest. Omwami has served on the board of Tutkijaliitto since 2023.
Sasha Huber is a Helsinki-based, internationally recognised, multidisciplinary visual artist of Swiss-Haitian heritage. Huber’s work is concerned with the politics of memory, care, and belonging in relation to colonial residues left in the environment. Her signature working method is the staple gun. While being aware of its symbolic significance as a weapon, it offers her the potential to renegotiate unequal power dynamics, and a possibility of repair, of symbolically stitching together colonial wounds. She holds an MA in visual culture from Aalto University in Helsinki and is presently undertaking a practice-based PhD in artistic research at the Zurich University of the Arts. Huber also works in a creative partnership with visual artist Petri Saarikko with the ongoing project Remedies. From 2021–24 her work has been touring under the title “You Name It” which was circulated by The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto.
https://www.sashahuber.com/
Vishnu Vardhani Rajan (they/ them) born and raised in Hyderabad, India, is a Helsinki based artist and activist working across media, platforms and publics. Their practice straddles performance, film, stand-up comedy, poetry, quilting and drag. In 2020 Vishnu was one of the co-conveners for a covid-era online reading group on Russell’s first publication Glitchfeminism and went on to form part of a working group for its translation into Finnish (2022). Vishnu’s platform Convivial Complaint Cell (CCC), will be mobilised as part of the reading group for Black Meme. Inspired by the ideas of theorist Sara Ahmed on complaint making as diversity work, the reading group is held by CCC’s feminist interventions and accountability taking processes for community building.
https://www.vishnuvardhani.com/
Helen Kaplinsky (she/her) is a curator and writer based between Finland and the UK. Over the past decade her projects have spanned questions of postdigital identity, femininity and ownership. She is currently undertaking a PhD developing curatorial practice and scholarship on feminine, often monstrous historical subjects in contemporary art, that she terms ‘protofeminisms’. She has curated several projects involving cyberfeminism and its inheritances in current feminist art practice. The 2017 Alembic programme included the commissioning of Russell’s essay ‘On #GLITCHFEMINISM and The Glitch Feminism Manifesto’, which preceded the Glitchfeminism monograph and can be read here: https://beingres.org/2017/10/17/legacy-russell/
Museum of Impossible Forms - A reading group for the publication has been taking place at MIF, prior to this book launch event. MIF is a cultural center and the coming together of communities of art and cultural workers working to build anti-colonial, anti-patriarchal, and non-fascist commitments and futures. It is located in East Helsinki. https://www.museumofimpossibleforms.org
