Frida Orupabo

Frida Orupabo is a Nigerian Noregian artist living and working in Oslo, Norway.

A multidisciplinary artist with a background in sociology, Orupabo excavates found images, colonial archives, and other digital sources to create collages that confront questions of visual identity. She is interested in disrupting mainstream representations marked by historic violence of Black women and their bodies. Orupabo cuts and splices images into disjointed, and at times unsettling, forms, pointing to the layered, fragile composition of the self. Central to her practice, this intentional fragmentation resists monolithic notions of identity and suggests a more intersectional, nuanced approach.

Selected solo shows include All is broken in the night, Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin (2024); Things I saw at night, Modern Art, London (2023); Closed up like a fist, Nicola Vassell Gallery, New York (2022) and Frida Orupabo, 34 São Paulo Biennial, Museu Afro Brasil (2021). Group shows include Her Voice Echoes of Chantal Akerman, Fotomuseum, Antwerp (2023); Chrysalis: The Butterfly Dream, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2023); Rested, Nicola Vassell Gallery, New York (2021); We Fight to Build a Free World, Jewish Museum, New York (2020) and Niepodlegle: Women, Independence and National Discourse, Museum of Modern Art Warsaw (2018). Her work is in the collections of The Studio Museum in Harlem, Astrup Fearnley Museum, Huis Marseilles, KADIST Foundation, Paris / San Francisco, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Moderna Museet, Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Museum Ludwig, National Museum, Oslo, Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum, Perez Art Museum, Preus Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,Turku Art Museum, Alexander Tutsek Foundation, Munich, The Dean Collection, and Marieluise

Hessel Foundation.