“As a white man you may really feel such as you’re boxed in,” says Frida Orupabo. “However not in the identical manner as girls and positively not Black girls. It’s this understanding of who you might be earlier than you handle to open your mouth.” As she leads me by means of her Oslo house, the Norwegian artist makes issues clear with a disarmingly heat smile. “Don’t write about me as a loopy maniac.”
Orupabo, whose enigmatic works rethink racial stereotypes, has a white Norwegian mom and a Black Nigerian father, who returned to Nigeria when Frida was an toddler. “Though I’m a Norwegian-Nigerian artist, I used to be born and raised in Norway and Norway is the tradition that I do know.” Her artwork, nonetheless, asks whether or not that tradition is aware of her.
Orupabo, 39, whose work can be offered at Artwork Basel by Galerie Nordenhake, has a particular visible language, created by layering and collaging photos appropriated from colonial archives — usually ambiguous photographs of Black girls — that are reworked into typically fanciful, usually unnerving compositions.
On Lies, Secrets and techniques and Silence, her largest institutional exhibition up to now, was staged on the Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, and Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, in 2024-25. It surveyed her gothic, whimsical pursuits: her supply materials contains classic pornography, Porky Pig cartoons, medical photos and pictures of combs and black gloves. Her “Large Lady II” (2024), a larger-than-life-size paper collage, constructs a Black girl out of a number of historic photos: a jigsaw-puzzle of pores and skin tones in a single determine. The lady seems to be instantly on the viewer. Like lots of her collages, it’s each participating and unsettling.
Whereas Orupabo’s imaginative and prescient seems to be again to Dada, surrealism and pop artwork — in addition to the basic horror motion pictures she loves — her slicing, pasting and pinning has fashioned a physique of labor that’s each idiosyncratic and born of private expertise.
Right this moment, she is married to a white Norwegian man and the couple have two younger daughters. Their house is each a household residence and a studio. Her working area is a modest and uncluttered field room with just some cut-outs mendacity on a desk. “It’s not what folks count on,” she says. “I’m not poshy-posh. I work on the ground and sometimes in the lounge. Generally you’ll not see traces of any work . . . The work adjustments in accordance with what’s round you.”
As she makes espresso, Orupabo explains how her art-making matches round motherhood. “There may be at all times one thing. In the event that they’re sick, they’ll sleep whereas I work, I don’t need to go far. And I prefer to be near my espresso,” she says, weighing the beans for her grinder. She locations a cup of black Norwegian espresso down subsequent to me, earlier than returning with milk and sugar: “Now you may break it.”
She is humorous and open however admits to hating interviews. “You lose management.” The unease feels apt: the push-pull between illustration and misrepresentation lies on the coronary heart of her artwork.
Orupabo was born in 1986 in Sarpsborg, a small metropolis some 90km south of Oslo. After learning for a masters in sociology she labored as a social employee, liaising with immigrant households and intercourse staff. “It was heavy on the thoughts,” she says. Artwork was a type of leisure; she drew and made collages of snapshots from each side of her household after which began looking out on-line for nameless historic pictures, all as “a technique to make sense of issues”.
She started posting digital compositions on Instagram within the mid-2010s, earlier than progressing to creating bodily collages. Extra not too long ago, her preparations have grow to be three dimensional, with photos printed on to material and metallic objects resembling health club weights and coat hangers. Discovered movie footage additionally informs looped video works.
Is her artwork an extension of her social work? “I do know it has a objective nevertheless it didn’t begin like that,” she says. “By displaying the work and by getting galleries I used to be compelled to replicate on why I’m doing the issues I’m doing and to place language on it. It’s important to body your personal work.”
In 2017, Orupabo was included in Arthur Jafa: A Collection of Totally Unbelievable, But Extraordinary Renditions on the Serpentine Galleries in London. Since then, she has had solo reveals at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York, Rencontres d’Arles and the thirty fourth Bienal de São Paulo. In 2023, she was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Pictures Basis Prize.
Curators have positioned her work as a part of an ongoing creative dialogue about race. Her works “will not be solely visually compelling however additionally they problem, query and increase how we see the world”, says Claes Nordenhake, founding father of Galerie Nordenhake. “Frida’s exploration of identification, historical past and illustration aligns with our mission to champion artists who confront complicated truths and provoke significant dialogue, one thing we imagine is extra essential than ever in in the present day’s cultural panorama.”
Orupabo’s material and conceptual, equivocal supply may be tough for viewers, observes Solveig Øvstebø, director of Astrup Fearnley Museet. The Oslo retrospective noticed brutal and sexual materials mixed and entwined with playful imagery. “It kicks you,” says Øvstebø. “This, I feel, is why it’s so efficient. As a result of your guard is down. I needed her to do her factor, though I knew some college courses may not come.”
The sensation of not being accepted is one thing Orupabo has at all times recognized. “I bear in mind working as a social employee at a centre the place there have been many ladies from Nigeria, they usually have been laughing at me as a result of I used to be the half-caste,” she says. “I used to be doing the identical issues that my white buddies have been doing. The one distinction was that I used to be not white. And I feel that fucked up my mind a bit.”
She has a detailed household and good buddies. The hurtful feedback have often come from strangers. “How we assemble race and perceive race is so refined,” she says. She remembers the second her now husband launched her to his father and stepmother. “I introduced my good friend and he or she’s white. At first his stepmother didn’t acknowledge me. The very first thing she does is to go as much as my good friend and say: ‘Hello, so you might be Martin’s accomplice?’ She couldn’t even think about that he would choose me.”
Projections of “otherness” have been frequent, she says, though Norwegians are extraordinarily well mannered, discreet and proudly politically right. “It doesn’t need to be that you just’re referred to as the N-word or that folks hit you,” she notes. “However in these small issues, it slips out.”
Though her work stays rooted within the Black narrative, a Scandinavian component stays. “A part of the work may be very a lot linked to my white, Western upbringing. As an example, you will notice trousers, sneakers and purses: all of these items are actually hooked up to my grandmother and great-grandmother, on the white facet.”
At Basel, Nordenhake will current three items exhibited on the Astrup Fearnley exhibition, together with “Her” (2024), a collage of Black faces printed on to a monumental green-tinted curtain, together with 4 new works, two of which function attire drawn by one in all Orupabo’s daughters, right here worn by an unknown girl from the early twentieth century. In one other new collage, “Ghost” (2025), a cut-out cartoonish phallic phantom emerges from a Black girl’s vagina. “It’s a shock when issues come up from there,” she says.
Sometimes, Orupabo feels discomfort at reconfiguring a picture of an actual individual. “Generally I cannot ship works to an exhibition, if I really feel like this works for me nevertheless it doesn’t work for that context.” The complicated idea of the gaze issues her. If somebody objected to her use of their great-grandmother’s likeness, she would “have a dialogue” however “that is a part of artwork, you can’t restrict your self”.
So how would she react if — a century from now — {a photograph} of her was utilized by one other artist? She erupts into laughter. “I might be pissed.” The vicissitudes of interpretation matter to Frida Orupabo.
Galerie Nordenhake, Artwork Basel sales space S13, nordenhake.com
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