Frida Orupabo

Frida Orupabo collects images she finds on the Internet. In her early work, her art consisted of a digital archive on Instagram. Orupabo’s extensive pictorial material focuses on themes such as racism, identity and history.

Instagram art

Orupabo has a degree in sociology. In 2013 she began creating digital collages, which she shared on Instagram. Four years later her Instagram account was discovered by the US American artist Arthur Jafa, who invited her to exhibit together with him in London. She was subsequently offered a solo exhibition at the prestigious gallery Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York, and her career began to flourish.

Misproportioned paper dolls

Orupabo eventually began to create paper collages. Heads and other body parts were assembled into deformed paper dolls. The distorted figures appear as unpleasant but graceful, and imposing but vulnerable. Orupabo has said to the paper Dagens Næringsliv that she hates what the images she uses are expressing, But they offer disturbing narratives of racism and gender relations, abuse and violence, strength and resistance. The collages add a new element to her work with digital images. Here she combines her ongoing pictorial research with a relatively classical collage technique. The works evoke associations with the first collages that were created, invented by the anti-art movement Dada, and especially bring to mind the political works of Hannah Höch and John Heartfield.

Alienation and being an outsider

Several of the works address Orupabo’s own identity and her experience of feeling different. She was born in Norway to a Norwegian mother and a Nigerian father. The pictures she uses show dark-skinnedpeople , faces she can identify with. At the same time her works deal with a larger story: slavery, alienation and being an outsider: an old trauma that  we still have not coped with. She says:

“In the beginning, all I wanted was to make a kind of diary. A dialogue with myself. A place for my frustration, in terms of ethnicity, complexion, sexuality, gender. I work with pictures I can recognise myself in. I rarely saw them when I was growing up.”
- Frida Orupabo to Dagens Næringsliv 22 March 2018.

The National Museum purchased its first work by Orupabo, a video collage, in 2018. The following year the museum acquired this work, which was shown at the Venice Biennale that same year.