Sociologist and visual artist, Frida Orupabo’s work consists of digital and physical collages in various forms, which explore questions related to race, family relations, gender, sexuality, violence and identity.
Woman with a Bouquet
Collage with paper pins
160 x 118 cm
63 x 46 1/2 in
2021
Unique piece
In her collages, Norwegian-Nigerian artist Frida Orupabo dismembers then reassembles bodies, particularly those of black women, denouncing the brutality of their pictorial representations throughout history. She gathers the visual material for her work from the Internet, drawing on artistic imagery as well as popular, scientific, ethnographic and medical imagery, to which she adds photographs from her family archives, to address issues such as colonial violence, racism, identity and sexuality. Through her collages, in which scar-like tears appear, she deconstructs stereotypes and the processes of objectification, fixation and alteration in which photography has become complicit. Frida Orupabo highlights the social and political structures that determine the way we see images, and how these structures organise our thinking.