Frida Orupabo’s solo exhibition opens tomorrow at the Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo. Alongside works using a unique collage technique, On Lies, Secrets and Silence includes large-scale images displayed as spatial installations and a video installation, suggesting a material and conceptual evolution of the artist’s practice.
Orupabo’s incisive work unearths violence in historic photographic and popular archives as well as contemporary digital media. She draws from personal experiences that are deeply intertwined with shared, collective experiences, reimagining these difficult images into otherworldly collages, videos, and sculptures. This 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 social, economic and political structures, enabling a sensitive examination of subjects such as race, gender, sexuality, and familial bonds.
The exhibition’s starting point is our most private and intimate space—the home. The complex relationships that are contained within the domestic sphere, central to our everyday lives and the creation of identity, are probed by Orupabo. Through subtle changes, familiar environments and relationships are transformed from safe and welcoming, to strange and uncomfortable. Several works are reminiscent of cut-out dolls, built up layer by layer, and loosely pinned together, but rather than play, they are figures of resistance. Reconstructed bodies possess an agency of their own that embraces the multi-layered and malleable nature of the self.
Frida Orupabo was born 1986 in Sarpsborg, Norway. She lives and works in Oslo.
She has an upcoming solo show at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover (2025). She presented solo exhibitions at Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2024); Fotomuseum Winterthur (2022); Museu Afro Brasil, São Paulo (2021); Kunsthall Trondheim (2021); Huis Marseille, Amsterdam (2020); Portikus, Frankfurt am Main and Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (both 2019). Orupabo participated in the 15th Gwangju Biennial (2024); the Okayama Art Summit (2022); the 34th São Paulo Biennial (2021) as well as the 58th Venice Biennale (2018).
Orupabo will be awarded the prize SPECTRUM – Internationaler Preis für Fotografie in 2025. She received the Royal Photographic Society Honorary Fellowship (2023); and was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize and the Joan Miró Prize (both in 2023), as well as the Future Generation Art Prize (2020).
Her work is included in the collections of Tate, UK, Guggenheim Museum, USA, Studio Museum in Harlem, USA, LACMA, USA, Kadist Foundation, France / USA, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, Museum Ludwig, Germany, Jumex Museum, Mexico, Kistefors Collection, Norway, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, Moderna Museet, Sweden, Mumok, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Austria, Nasjonalmuseet, Norway, Foundation ARCO, Spain, Perez Art Museum, USA, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Norway, Göteborgs Konstmuseum, Sweden, KIASMA, Finland, Verbund Collection, Austria, 21C Hotel Museum, USA, A4 Arts Foundation, South Africa, Alexander Tutsek-Foundation, Germany, Dean Collection, USA, Museum Rietberg, Switzerland, Scheryn Collection, South Africa, Turku Art Museum, Finland, Marieluise Hessel Collection, USA and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Galerie Nordenhake Berlin
Jerónimo Rüedi
And Between us Occurs the Following Conversation
January 25 – February 22, 2025
Galerie Nordenhake Stockholm
Torsten Andersson
Key Works 1946 – 2006
January 16 – February 15, 2025
Galerie Nordenhake
Mexico City
Yngve Holen
Furrow
February 4 – March 15, 2025
Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo
February 7 – April 27, 2025
