Frida Orupabo
Born in Norway and of dual Norwegian and Nigerian heritage, artist Frida Orupabo is also a trained sociologist who mines images from archives, the media, and her personal life to create new readings and meanings.
Her physical and digital collages of fragmented Black bodies address issues of representation of the Black female body in historic photographs, colonialism, and racism. The images on view reclaim the gaze of Black subjects and reverse the narrative of victimhood.
Frida Orupabo (Norway, born 1986), Untitled, 2019, collage with paper pins mounted on aluminum (exhibition copy), 35 10/16 x 22 6/16 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nordenhake Stockholm/Berlin/Mexico City. © Frida Orupabo
“Through the distortion and manipulation of images, my work tries to say something about different social constructions—race, gender, sexuality, beauty, class. I aim to explore their interconnectedness as well as to look at white fantasies about blackness, specifically the black female body. I am concerned with the damage and consequences of being determined from the outside, but I also look into the possibility of resistance—how we challenge and re-create. I am trying to make works that speak to the reality I know. I aim for complexities—to show women in pain, women that are vulnerable, women that exhibit strength and wrath, confusion and clarity—and I try to speak of the interaction and clash between past and present, between self-representation and imposed representation.”
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