PinchukArtCentre

Frida Orupabo

Frida Orupabo lives and works in Oslo, Norway. Orupabo’s artworks denude and dismember the multifarious legacies of colonialism, controverting its still-engrained narratives of race, gender, and ownership. Historical photographs of black women provide her not only with source material and subject matter, but first-person narrators as well. The hierarchical relation between subject, viewer, and author — the latter two of which roles have been historically denied to black women — is destabilized, distinctions between the positions are blurred, reframed, and upended. Orupabo has shown her works at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise (NYC and Rome), Portikus (Frankfurt am Main), Gallery Nordenhake (Berlin), amongst other venues. In 2019 she participated in the 58th Venice Biennale.
Frida Orupabo lives and works in Oslo, Norway. Orupabo’s artworks denude and dismember the multifarious legacies of colonialism, controverting its still-engrained narratives of race, gender, and ownership. Historical photographs of black women provide her not only with source material and subject matter, but first-person narrators as well. The hierarchical relation between subject, viewer, and author — the latter two of which roles have been historically denied to black women — is destabilized, distinctions between the positions are blurred, reframed, and upended. Orupabo has shown her works at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise (NYC and Rome), Portikus (Frankfurt am Main), Gallery Nordenhake (Berlin), amongst other venues. In 2019 she participated in the 58th Venice Biennale.