Frida Orupabo “Cables To Rage”

Frida Orupabo “Cables To Rage”

Gavin Brown's Enterprise

This event has ended.

On Sunday, March 4th, Gavin Brown’s enterprise will open Frida Orupabo’s first solo exhibition, presenting a group of new collages constructed from Orupabo’s prolific archive of found materials. These works serve as a physical extension of the artist’s Instagram feed, @nemiepeba, a collection of image, text, video and sound — cropped, excerpted, magnetized, layered, and ultimately framed in a square, virtual space.

SERIAL, CONCATENATE, SUBLIME
The first thing I ever saw of Frida’s, a little over three years ago, was her Instagram feed, under the name @nemiepeba. It is still, as it was then, relentless, incandescent. Clearly the most advanced iteration of her practice. I posted this at the time:

Mastery isn’t a term I throw around lightly. Particularly in a medium so newly founded that it’s only just beginning to settle into what might be considered parameters. Instagram is a platform that can support lots of different kinds of exchanges. Some mundane, some moderately interesting, some super personal, some baldly mercantile. Think of it as a floor. There’s a range of things that can happen on it. Folks can stand on it, they can cross it, some may sit or even lie on it. Folks can fight on it, shit on it, fuck on it, really it can support an infinite range of activity. But dancing, on or across a floor, most will recognize as a very specific, infinitely variable and yet uniquely ‘elevated’ sort of activity. It is perhaps the activity par excellence which transforms the most fundamental of human modalities, standing and/or walking, from its functional basis (and the very material, or physical, structure of being) to something more. We name a thing ‘dance’ when the normal, the pedestrian, becomes expressive or supernormal. Nemiepeba is a dancer. Check the thread to see how she’s moving us, forward.
Reading this back now, I’m struck mostly by my insistence that you check it out. Check it out. It’s not a library book but in its availability, in its complexly democratic, jazzy dyslexicality, in its unfurling, permutational mode of public address, its combination of intimate scale and infinite scope, it is as emancipatory as the random access to deep feeling and thinking made manifest in the humble ‘library book’. Not owned but freely accessed. I’m thinking Walt Whitman here but with the over-determined insularity of Emily Dickinson. But also, like Cecil (Taylor) a dumb tsunami of ontological assertion.

AVAILABLE, INSISTENT, RELENTLESS
Ostensibly a collection of serially presented images, some ‘found’, some constructed, extracted, or emptied out. What one is confronted with is nothing less than a procession of deeply figured picture sequences (mostly still but often moving) that hover above a darkly articulated subject position without ever quite settling into anything simply declarative, or perhaps even enunciative. In its unhurried, yet temporaneous delivery of ‘pictures’ (material instantiation of images), one is left with (to my gut) an affective field, which is as black and unprecedented as anything ever produced under the regime of what clearly is some form of proto cinema. Some culturally dictated, altern path not yet taken. Perhaps an instantiation of Fred Moten’s ‘anacinema’. In any event, what I’m left with after continually encountering Frida’s Instagram thread for the past several years is, this is nothing short of a mobile repository, a litany of residua, a voluptuous trail of black continuity, pyramid schemata as densely inscribed as any book of the dead, not so much an archive as an ark, a borne witness to the singularity that is blackness.
A black thing wholly of the Internet, a rolling deep, limbic expressway to our newly mediated black sociality (how can one put down the newfound ability to put a thing down, once it’s been grasped?), the terms (and cost) of engagement have to be laid (like the railway, or, again, the Internet). It’s some new shit, grounded in everything that’s come to us from the preceding century; cinema, television, epistolary exchange, algorithmic processors, jazz’s (and other ill suns like cubism, rock ’n roll, or more recently, hip hop and techno, all instantiations of black aesthetics), it’s a permutational, topological, syncretistic, re- indexicalisation of normative arrays, (hegemony/order). It’s the future (and for now free), and very black.
- Arthur Jafa

Frida Orupabo is a sociologist and artist living and working in Oslo, Norway. Past exhibitions include Arthur Jafa: A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions, Serpentine Gallery, London, 2017.

Media

• Photography
• Installation

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