STOCKHOLM.- Bonniers Konsthall will open the fall of 2024 with Frida Orupabo’s first solo exhibition at a Swedish institution. On Lies, Secrets and Silence takes its starting point in our most private and intimate space—the home. Through newly produced works in the form of collage, video and sculpture, staged as spatial installations, the exhibition focuses on the complex relationships that are contained within the domestic sphere, central to our everyday lives and in the creation of our identity. Familiar environments and relationships that suddenly, through subtle changes, may transform from safe to strange and unpleasant.
In recent years, Frida Orupabo (b. 1986, based in Oslo, Norway) has been recognized internationally as one of the most important artists of our time. In her image-based practice, she works with digital and physical collages, exploring issues of identity, gender, family relations and racism. Her work draws from personal experiences that are deeply intertwined with shared, collective experiences. Using a distinct collage technique, Orupabo’s artistic 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 many social, economic and political structures.
Through the distortion and manipulation of images, my work tries to say something about different social constructions – race, gender, sexuality, beauty, class. I aim to explore their interconnectedness as well as to look at white fantasies about blackness, specifically the black female body. I am concerned with the damage and consequences of being determined from the outside, but I also look into the possibility of resistance – how we challenge and re-create. I am trying to make works that speak to the reality I know. – Frida Orupabo
Frida Orupabo is a trained sociologist and has been collecting images all her life. Her artistic journey took off when, while working at a center for human trafficking and sex workers, she collected images from the internet. Her carefully curated feed, which she shares on her Instagram account @nemiepeba, includes material from digitized colonial archives, popular culture contexts and the internet at large. The Instagram account has been widely recognized, and when the prominent American artist Arthur Jafa took notice of Orupabo’s images, which he has described as “not so much an archive as an ark, a borne witness to the singularity that is blackness.” He invited Orupabo to present her work in his exhibition at the Serpentine North Gallery in London (2017).
Today, Orupabo has established herself as an artist who rejects the ideas of originality and authenticity. She appropriates images, disassembling them in her works to highlight the violence inherent in their distribution. The bodies in her pieces transcend the limitations imposed by the archives. Many of the works are reminiscent of cutout dolls, built up layer by layer, loosely pinned together – but rather than play, they are figures of resistance. Orupabo’s reconstructed bodies possess an agency of their own, but at the same time emphasize the multi-layered and malleable nature of the self. Philosopher Judith Butler’s theories of queerness, gender and identity, particularly performativity in Gender Trouble (1990), describes how individuals alternate between the roles of subject and object in social contexts. The pantin doll, which is both controlled as an object and expresses itself as a subject, illustrates the ambivalence and the feeling of being imposed bodily prejudices.
The exhibition presents two large-scale collages, Big Girl I (2024) and Big Girl II (2024), two Amazonian women as pantin dolls majestically gazing down at the viewer. Orupabo uses the gaze as a powerful means to reclaim power and subjectivity. This method is in line with feminist theorist bell hooks’ ideas on the politics of the gaze, which she discusses in detail in The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators (1992). hooks describes how the resilient gaze can challenge and reshape power structures, and Orupabo channels this power in her works to give black women a place of power and subjectivity. In so doing, she reshapes and reclaims historical and cultural narratives.
In the exhibition, Frida Orupabo explores everyday motifs linked to or taken from the home. Collages of everyday objects create scenes that convey both proximity and distance. Symbols of childhood and security, such as the doll’s house in the video installation House Party (2024), become a way of exploring the dark sides of the home, and the relationships that are contained therein, through Orupabo’s lens. The exhibition invites us to reflect on how emotions and experiences such as security and anxiety, closeness and distance coexist and shape our identity in depth, and how we navigate our most intimate spaces.
The title of the exhibition is taken from a prose collection by Adrienne Rich, one of America’s foremost poets and feminist theorists. In a poetic landscape, Rich’s collection On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978 (1995) addresses issues of racism, history, motherhood, and the politics of language. For Rich, as for Orupabo, the works become part of the effort to define a female subjectivity that is political, aesthetic, and erotic, and that refuses to be included in a culture of passivity.
