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‘IN SUNLIGHT I WAS PLASTICINE PERFORMANCE’, Juliana Huxtable wrote about her teenage years, in her first book published earlier this year ‘MUTING CREATIVE AND SEXUAL IMPULSES TO APPEAR AMICABLE AND DIGESTABLE TO THOSE AROUND ME I WAS THE BIRACIAL GIRL IN A TARGET AD WITH A CATALOGUE SMILE AND UNASSUMING SILHOUETTE AND PROFILE, IT’S NEGRO VIRILITY PACIFICED’ Huxtable’s work regularly draws on her biography and appearance, creating prose, poems and photographic self-portraits that have established hers as a voice of progress in a society in retrograde   Huxtable’s first solo exhibition in the UK is untitled, and on entering Project Native Informant, I encounter a set of photographs of tattoos, on the arm, chest, and back of a muscular brown man One image shows a right bicep, on to which a bearded man wearing a ‘Black Lives Matter’ t-shirt has been inked Another photograph shows the words ‘Anti-AntiFa: Alternative Fashion’ written across the man’s pectoral A rightwing alliance formed in opposition to the anti-fascist movement, Anti-Antifa exemplify the manner in which white supremacists have taken to co-opting the language of civil rights activism It’s hard to reconcile how two such opposing tattoos appear on the same body The photographs are difficult to decode I spend time with them and consider the authenticity of the tattoos, whether they have been transferred on, or, if they are permanent, why somebody would choose such contradictory iconography? There’s a clear and conscious hi-jacking of meaning within these forceful symbols that remains in play throughout the exhibition   Project Native Informant’s show follows from one at New York’s Reena Spaulings Gallery in May 2017, ‘A Split During Laughter at the Rally’ There, Huxtable exhibited Untitled (The Wall) (2017), a flowchart that traced the complex, and politically fraught, devolution of skinhead symbology What started out as an aesthetic that belonged to the first wave, anti-racist Punk movement in 1960s Britain – a movement that included West Indian communities through ‘skinhead reggae’ – was soon appropriated by successive Neo-Nazi groups, before it was adopted by the fashion industry (think Vivienne Westwood), and then used as iconography for mundane consumer culture