Opening – 26 APR 2024, 6-9 pm

In her second solo exhibition at Galerie Nordenhake in Berlin, Frida Orupabo presents a new body of large-scale prints, collages and sculptures. Orupabo engages with archival practices and a therein lying power of images and speculation, that forcefully reflects onto questions of race, gender, identity, sexuality, the gaze and colonial violence. Leveraging the vast spaces of the internet, Orupabo cuts, reassembles and layers found images to form collages as transformed bodies and contexts. Trained as a sociologist, the artist first started collecting and presenting a carefully crafted personal archive via her Instagram account @nemiepeba in the early 2010s, while employed at a centre for human trafficking and sex workers. The artist creates her own narratives by way of manipulating an archival reality to oppose the lack of representation, having grown up in Norway, born to a white Norwegian mother and a Black Nigerian father. For Orupabo, ‘to create work that looks back at the viewer is a way to refuse to be made into an object, and to say, ‘I see you’.’ By experimenting with different modes of seeing and unseeing, she demands a way of actively looking at the work. Whether the collages are physical or digital, the cutting, layering, and placing of images emphasises a historical reinforcement of racial representations that needs to be formed anew.