Frida Orupabo: “It became about stealing things back”

Located in Fagerborg, a quiet, leafy suburban neighbourhood in northern Oslo, Frida Orupabo’s studio is not what you’d expect from an artist with four solo shows opening in four different countries this year. For one thing, it’s in her home, a bright, open, elegantly furnished space where she lives with her partner and two young children. At the back of the apartment, in what doubles as a guest room and children’s play area, Orupabo makes her work.

On the day of my visit, evidence of the Norwegian artist’s prolific output over the past few years is scarce. The space feels like any other in the apartment, comfortable and domestic, with a tricycle in the middle of the room, a doll’s house in the corner and a cupboard filled with DVDs, puzzles and board games. Several of her collages adorn the walls but this, she tells me, “is just for show”, a way of making the space feel more like an artist’s studio for Plaster’s photoshoot that took place earlier that morning. A stack of catalogues from her recent solo exhibition, ‘On Lies, Secrets and Silence’, at Oslo’s Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art sit on the floor, while cut out images – the strongest indication of the room’s true purpose – occupy the table and bed, covered in tissue and ready to be assembled.

As studios go, it’s unconventional, but then so is the artist. Following rejection from art school, Orupabo, who is half Nigerian, studied sociology at university before becoming a social worker. During the day, Orupabo provided support and counselling at a centre for sex workers, and in the evenings she pursued her life-long interest in found imagery, collecting photographs of predominantly Black subjects from digital archives, films, cartoons, textbooks and online, which she spliced together into collages that she shared on Instagram. It was only in 2017, when her work was featured by US artist Arthur Jafa at his Serpentine exhibition, ‘A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions’, that Orupabo’s formal journey as an artist began.

Since then she has exhibited at biennials in Venice and Sao Paulo, held solo shows in Miami, Rome and Paris, seen her work enter the permanent collections of Tate, Guggenheim and LACMA and, most recently, been awarded the Spectrum International Prize for Photography. Even with this rapidly expanding list of accolades, Orupabo could not be happier with her modest home set up. “I love being able to work whenever I need to,” she says. “I just need paper and a printer.”

Though a self-professed “home person”, Orupabo’s complicated relationship to the country of her birth has shaped her work, for better and worse. “Norway suits my personality,” she says,  “people work slower here so it’s a different rhythm. But at the same time it’s also a culture that values whiteness, and so I never felt 100 % – your identity is always questioned.” This sense of alienation and invisibility has driven Orupabo’s work from the beginning, feeding a hunger to “create images that were not of white people.”

Working mainly with collage, as well as more recent forays into film and installation, Orupabo’s unsettling assemblages of collected body parts reflect the historical violence and fragmentation of Black bodies, particularly women, in ethnographic and colonial archives. By removing them from that context and giving them new life, her collages become decolonising acts of resistance that challenge the power dynamics of these representational forms. With their surreal, Frankensteinian arrangements of faces and disjointed limbs, they are confronting and complex, fixing on us with a gaze that is difficult to return.

“It starts in different places,” says Orupabo, who, when parenting duties permit, wiles away the evening hours hunting for images online that she adds to an enormous collection on Dropbox. “Usually I will start with something I love, for instance, this is [Francis Bacon],” she says, pointing across the apartment to one of her collages just visible through the studio door. “You see the white body? I love that shape. I don’t know if it’s the breasts or the shoulders but I’ve used that shape before. I would start with that in Photoshop and then find legs and arms and test things like faces and hair. Then I’ll print it, cut out the shapes and start moving things around on the floor before I tape and pin it.”

Over the years, this process of layering has grown increasingly complex as Orupabo mines images from a wider range of sources. “In my first collages I used purely colonial archives, which were mainly black and white without much variation in dress,” she explains. “But in the last couple of years I’ve started looking elsewhere, particularly at vintage porn and films, so there’s more colour, it’s more cartoonish and more surreal.”

For the recent Art Basel, Orupabo presented four new collages with Galerie Nordenhake, as well as three works from her recent show at Astrup Fearnley. Unlike previous collages made in monochrome, these new works introduce flashes of colour. In Flowers, a figure peeled apart and re-stitched like a haunted marionette floats mid-air in a makeshift dress taken from a drawing made by Orupabo’s eldest daughter. With its glitchy fabric and bold teal lines, the innocent, doll-like femininity clashes violently with the subject’s gaze: sharp, charged and unflinching. Orupabo rejects smoothness. She lets us see the edits, the breakages, the refusal to cohere. This is an anatomy of fragmentation: the afterimage of the Black feminine as it is surveilled, desired and distorted. She doesn’t just collage; she sutures trauma.

Orupabo’s collages claw through the digital morgue of colonial ethnography, anthropological debris, family snapshots, softcore pinups, and clinical atrocity – an archive that was never neutral, never benign. This is the politics of cut-and-paste warfare. Watermarks are still visible in many of her works, evidence of her willingness to “jump the fence” and take what was never meant for us – mugshots of ethnographic specimens, voyeuristic slices of Black domesticity – and reanimate them into resistance. “I’m constantly having to scratch on people’s doors when I’m searching for images,” she says. “Most of the time I have to break in because these archives still own these subjects and I don’t want to pay. For me it became about stealing things back.”

There’s something surgical in the way Orupabo works, but don’t confuse it with healing. This isn’t about repair – it’s about rupture. The question that pulses through every joint and hinge in her work is: who owns the image of Blackness? And what does it mean to reclaim it when the archive itself is a mausoleum built by whiteness? Orupabo’s archive is both theft and offering. She doesn’t just appropriate – she hijacks, re-choreographs, leaks new meanings through the cracks. Her work isn’t nostalgic, it’s insurgent. It makes clear that the archive has always been a weapon – and she’s here to turn it against its makers.