Frida Orupabo | On Lies, Secrets and Silence

Alongside works using a unique collage technique, On Lies, Secrets and Silence includes large-scale images displayed as spatial installations and a video installation, suggesting a material and conceptual evolution of the artist’s practice.

Orupabo’s incisive work unearths violences in historic photographic and popular archives as well as contemporary digital media. She draws from personal experiences that are deeply intertwined with shared, collective experiences, reimagining these difficult images into otherworldly collages, videos, and sculptures. This process is rooted in a photomontage tradition where she manipulates, cuts, arranges, inverts and loops images. Powerful as they are, these interventions create imaginative and poignant reworkings of motifs that seek to challenge colonial notions still embedded in social, economic and political structures, enabling a sensitive examination of subjects such as race, gender, sexuality, and familial bonds.

The exhibition’s starting point is our most private and intimate space—the home. The complex relationships that are contained within the domestic sphere, central to our everyday lives and the creation of identity, are probed by Orupabo. Through subtle changes, familiar environments and relationships are transformed from safe and welcoming, to strange and uncomfortable. Several works are reminiscent of cutout dolls, built up layer by layer, and loosely pinned together, but rather than play, they are figures of resistance. Reconstructed bodies possess an agency of their own that embraces the multi-layered and malleable nature of the self.

I guess the gaze has a strong presence in all of my works, I’m for the most part working with images where the subject gazes directly back at the spectator/viewer. It’s something about working with colonial archives which is so objectifying, so violent. The reversed gaze is important because to me it represents resistance and power. To look back is in a way to refuse objectification. It’s a way of speaking without sound.

Frida orupabo in interview with karolina modig, bonniers konsthall

Commissioned by Bonniers Konsthall and Astrup Fearnley Museet. The exhibition was on view at Bonniers Konsthall (Stockholm) from 28 August to 10 November 2024.  

Frida Orupabo (b. 1986 in Sarpsborg, Norway) lives and works in Oslo. Upcoming exhibitions include the 15th Gwangju Biennale (2024) and a solo exhibition at the Sprengel Museum in Hannover (2025). In 2023, she participated in the exhibition Flight at Malmö Konsthall alongside Kudzanai Chiurai and Eric Magassa. She presented solo exhibitions at Fotomuseum Winterthur (2022); Museu Afro Brasil, São Paulo (2021); Kunsthall Trondheim, Trondheim (2021); Huis Marseille, Amsterdam (2020); Portikus, Frankfurt am Main and Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (both 2019). Orupabo participated in the 34th São Paulo Biennial (2021) as well as the 58th Venice Biennial (2018). Together with Ming Smith and Missylanyus, she presented her work in Arthur Jafa’s exhibition at Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2019) and Serpentine Gallery, London (2017). Orupabo will be awarded the prize SPECTRUM – Internationaler Preis für Fotografie in 2025. The work of Frida Orupabo is inlcuded in several international collections.