“As a white man you may really feel such as you’re boxed in,” says Frida Orupabo. “However not in the identical approach as girls and definitely not Black girls. It’s this understanding of who you’re earlier than you handle to open your mouth.” As she leads me by way 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. “Although 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 photographs 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 footage and pictures of combs and black gloves. Her “Huge Woman II” (2024), a larger-than-life-size paper collage, constructs a Black lady out of a number of historic photographs: a jigsaw-puzzle of pores and skin tones in a single determine. The lady seems to be immediately on the viewer. Like lots of her collages, it’s each partaking 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 non-public expertise.
At the moment, she is married to a white Norwegian man and the couple have two younger daughters. Their house is each a household house 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 individuals anticipate,” 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 suits round motherhood. “There’s all the time one thing. In the event that they’re sick, they will sleep whereas I work, I don’t should go far. And I wish 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 finding out for a masters in sociology she labored as a social employee, liaising with immigrant households and intercourse employees. “It was heavy on the thoughts,” she says. Artwork was a type of leisure; she drew and made collages of snapshots from either side of her household after which began looking on-line for nameless historic pictures, all as “a solution to make sense of issues”.
She started posting digital compositions on Instagram within the mid-2010s, earlier than progressing to creating bodily collages. Extra lately, her preparations have turn out to be three dimensional, with photographs printed on to material and metallic objects comparable to 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 goal but it surely didn’t begin like that,” she says. “By displaying the work and by getting galleries I used to be pressured to mirror on why I’m doing the issues I’m doing and to place language on it. You need to body your personal work.”
In 2017, Orupabo was included in Arthur Jafa: A Collection of Completely Unbelievable, But Extraordinary Renditions on the Serpentine Galleries in London. Since then, she has had solo exhibits 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 Images Basis Prize.
Curators have positioned her work as a part of an ongoing creative dialogue about race. Her works “should not solely visually compelling however additionally they problem, query and broaden 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 advanced truths and provoke significant dialogue, one thing we consider is extra needed than ever in immediately’s cultural panorama.”
Orupabo’s material and conceptual, equivocal supply might be troublesome 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 faculty lessons won’t come.”
The sensation of not being accepted is one thing Orupabo has all the time identified. “I keep in mind working as a social employee at a centre the place there have been many ladies from Nigeria, and so they 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 associates 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 an in depth household and good associates. The hurtful feedback have often come from strangers. “How we assemble race and perceive race is so delicate,” she says. She recollects the second her now husband launched her to his father and stepmother. “I introduced my buddy 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 buddy and say: ‘Hello, so you’re Martin’s accomplice?’ She couldn’t even think about that he would decide me.”
Projections of “otherness” have been frequent, she says, though Norwegians are extraordinarily well mannered, discreet and proudly politically appropriate. “It doesn’t should be that you simply’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 could be very a lot linked to my white, Western upbringing. As an illustration, you will notice trousers, footwear and purses: all of these items are actually connected 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 characteristic attire drawn by one among Orupabo’s daughters, right here worn by an unknown lady from the early twentieth century. In one other new collage, “Ghost” (2025), a cut-out cartoonish phallic phantom emerges from a Black lady’s vagina. “It’s a shock when issues come up from there,” she says.
Often, 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 but it surely doesn’t work for that context.” The advanced 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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