Frida Orupabo, Comfort, 2022
Taking its evocative title from Gayle Jones’s Corregidora (1975), a novel on intergenerational trauma, Closed Up Like A Fist features a group of 16 haunting collages and digital prints by Norwegian Nigerian artist and sociologist Frida Orupabo. Pinning together cut-up imagery, much of it culled from colonial archives, Orupabo constructs anonymous, fragmented Black women subjects, sometimes with White body parts. These figures variously spread their sweeping batwings, crush Black and White dolls underfoot, stare out from behind chairs, or hold out an apple as if it were a pistol in a Western shootout — or a gift.
