Frida Orupabo “Closed Up Like A Fist”

Nicola Vassell Gallery

This event has ended.

Nicola Vassell Gallery presents “Closed Up Like A Fist,” an exhibition of collages and digital prints by Frida Orupabo.

Winged, pinned, and disembodied, Orupabo’s most recent collaged images confront the history of generational, discriminatory trauma and simultaneously offer recuperative possibilities.

Orupabo’s multidisciplinary practice excavates colonial archives and digital sources to amass her materials of dispossessed imagery. By splicing and combining these depictions, she brings into question the mutability of identities, delicately bound by fragmented components. The temporal aspect of these photographs addresses how past depictions inform contemporary images, and how the two are intertwined.

Frida Orupabo lives and works in Oslo. Having begun her professional life as a sociologist, her practice examines notions of race, familial relations, sexuality, gender, identity, and violence. Solo exhibitions of her work include How did you feel when you come out of the wilderness?, Kunsthall Trondheim, Trondheim, Norway (2021); I have seen a million pictures of my face and still I have no idea, Fotomuseum Winterhur, Winterhur, Switzerland (2022); A house is a house, Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin, Germany (2019); Hours After, Stevenson, Johannesburg, South Africa (2020); and Medicine for a nightmare, Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, Norway (2019). Selected group exhibitions include We Fight to Build A Free World, Jewish Museum, New York, NY (2020); Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, the Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK (2020); and What is the present?, the Museum für Gegenwartkunst Siegen, Germany (2020).