Europe
Frida Orupabo
Untitled
2018
Frida Orupabo, Untitled, 2018
The archival images used by Frida Orupabo in her collages trace stereotyped representations of race, gender, sexuality and violence. Her works are developed through a process of decontextualization of such imagery, layering and recomposing, playing with new narratives. In this work she focuses on memory and what might be triggered in the viewer. Often her work features bodies and limbs, however in this work, colonial violence is evoked through the animal’s skins that are taken as trophies. Presented in this format, they can also be read like maps alluding to the landscape or analyzed through their surgical compositions.
A central element of Frida Orupabo’s practice is her digital archive, storing images from both the media and from her personal life on her Instagram account, later transforming them into analogue collages. She is a trained sociologist and a self-taught artist and uses her collages to create new narratives and play with meaning. Utilizing images of colonial violence, the civil rights movement, early cinema and Afro-American cinema, she blends the personal with the political to construct a subjective perspective, addressing the politics of the gaze as tool of both power and emancipation, outlined by feminist theorist bell hooks. Focusing on themes of family, aging and fairytales, her work subverts the dominant gaze, recasting perceptions of victimhood.