Frida Orupabo: On Lies, Secrets and Silence

For over a decade, Norwegian artist Frida Orupabo has examined Black life and imagination using a language that is distinctly her own. Her practice, she’s said, has insisted on “the ambivalence and complexities that often get left out in representations of Black people,” unearthing the violence but also the resistance in the found imagery she uses. 

In her solo exhibition On Lies, Secrets and Silence at Astrup Fearnley Museet, the artist expands her investigation, considering our most private and intimate space—the home. Through newly produced works in the form of collage, video and sculpture, staged as spatial installations, this exhibition focuses on the varied relationships that are contained within the domestic sphere, central to our everyday lives and in the creation of our identity. Familiar environments and relationships in Orupabo’s practice may suddenly, through subtle shifts, transform from benign to strange and uncomfortable. 

The exhibition’s title is taken from a prose collection by Adrienne Rich, one of America’s foremost poets and feminist theorists. In a poetic landscape, Rich’s collection On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, Selected Prose 1966–1978 (1995) addresses a range of topics, including racism, history, motherhood, and the politics of language. For Rich, as for Orupabo, the works become part of the effort to define a female subjectivity that refuses to be included in a culture of passivity.   

A trained sociologist, Orupabo began collecting images from the internet while working at a center for human trafficking and sex workers. This archive soon found public expression on Instagram, and subsequently in physical collage. Her manipulation of these images is rooted in a photomontage tradition where she cuts, arranges, inverts and loops still and moving images. Powerful as they are, these interventions create imaginative and poignant reworkings of motifs that seek to challenge colonial notions still embedded in social, economic and political structures, enabling a sensitive examination of subjects such as race, gender, sexuality, and familial bonds. 

Commissioned by Bonniers Konsthall and Astrup Fearnley Museet. The exhibition was previously on view at Bonniers Konsthall (Stockholm) from 28 August to 10 November 2024. Curated by Owen Martin at Astrup Fearnley Museet and Yuvinka Medina at Bonniers Konsthall. 

Frida Orupabo, born in 1986 in Sarpsborg, Norway, lives and works in Oslo. She was educated at the University of Oslo in development studies and sociology (2005-2011). Solo exhibitions include, among others, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur (2022); Museu Afro Brasil, São Paulo (2021); Kunsthall Trondheim, Trondheim (2021); Huis Marseille, Amsterdam (2020); Portikus, Frankfurt am Main, and Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (both 2019). Orupabo participated in the 34th São Paulo Biennial (2021) as well as the 58th Venice Biennale (2018). This year, Orupabo has been awarded the prize SPECTRUM—Internationaler Preis für Fotografie.