Frida Orupabo explores themes of race, gender, sexuality, violence, the gaze, colonialism and identity in media that in their nature are fragmented and multifarious. Employing image platforms including Instagram, YouTube and Tumblr as both source and tool, Orupabo engages in the simultaneously monolithic and splintered abundance of images that define race and gender. In their wiki-generated content and labile fluidity these platforms simultaneously reinforce and disrupt established norms.
In 2013 Orupabo started an Instagram account and by 2016 her feed @nemiepeba developed into a curated stream of images and looping video clips. As an ever-evolving temporal collage, Instagram acted as a site for hoarding.
Born to a Norwegian mother and Nigerian father, Orupabo lives and works in Oslo and often uses photographs from colonial sources to investigate the way black women are portrayed as hyper-sexualised, deviant and subjects of curiosity and study. She explores how these loaded images address race and gender relations; pain, abuse, and violence, but also strength, power and resistance. In suites of works Orupabo addresses themes such as childbirth and motherhood, matriarchal relations, childhood and play and discipline. Most recently her figures explore the paradoxical persona of the Strong Black Woman which, in its idealisation, simultaneously obscures the profound wounds of racism. The figures are both brazen and vulnerable, subjects and objects.
Orupabo's figures bear the scars of their stories. They are de-formed and re-formed, unshackled from the confines of their photographic likenesses. The figures that populate Orupabo's physical collages and digital montages are mainly found on the internet. The artist trawls material from thematic and arcane archives as well as the wider, more diffuse flotsam and jetsam of online imagery. Orupabo relocates her matriarchal figures in anachronistic conditions, clothes and reposes. The possibilities of corporeal dislocation and reassembly inherent to collage restores them to sovereign protagonists of their own stories.
Selected solo exhibitions include Nicola Vassell Gallery, New York (2022); Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2022); Kunsthall Trondheim, Norway (2021); Hours After, Stevenson, Johannesurg, South Africa (2020); Medicine for a Nightmare, Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo; The Mouth and the Truth, Portikus, Frankfurt am Main, Germany (2019); and A House is a House, Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin, Germany (2019).
She has participated in the Munch Triennial, Munchmuseet, Oslo, Norway (2022); 34th Bienal de São Paulo, Fundação Bienal, São Paulo, Brazil (2021); and the 58th International Art Exhibition, Biennale Arte, Venice, Italy (2019).
She was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2023, and the Joan Miró Prize 2023.
