Orupabo centers Black archival practices, speculation, motherhood, and the perpetual construction and deconstruction of the archival object. As part of the award, her work is currently on view at the Photographer’s Gallery in London.įrida Orupabo, Hair roller, 2022, collage, paper pins, 74 3⁄4 × 40 1⁄8". This year she was named one of four finalists (coincidentally, alongside Jafa) for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. Since then, Orupabo has had solo shows at Portikus in Frankfurt (2019) Kunsthall Trondheim in Norway (2021) and the Museo Afro Brasil in São Paulo, as part of the Thirty-Fourth São Paulo Bienal. A year later, curator Ralph Rugoff selected seven collages anda video work for “May You Live in Interesting Times,” the main project at the Fifty-Eighth Venice Biennale. ![]() The exhibition kicked off a series of collaborative projects at institutions like Oslo’s Kunstnernes Hus Stockholm’s Moderna Museet the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York, for which Jafa penned the text for Orupabo’s solo exhibition “Cables to Rage” in 2018. Her work caught the attention of Los Angeles–based filmmaker Arthur Jafa, who included the artist in his 2017 show at London’s Serpentine Gallery. Trained as a sociologist and formerly employed at a resource center for human trafficking and sex workers, Orupabo began to accumulate her own visual archive through Instagram in the early 2010s. She first turned to family photographs to make sense of her upbringing and surroundings before pivoting to the exclusive use of found imagery to reflect on tensions in a country that proclaims inclusivity despite alarming evidence of deep-rooted racial discrimination. Orupabo’s interest in Black ontology stems from her experience growing up in Norway as the child of a white Norwegian mother and a Black Nigerian father. Orupabo splices, weaves, braids, cuts, pastes, and pins components in a manner that aspires not to a fluid coherence but to an intentional misfitting. Through experiments that open different modes of seeing and unseeing, she offers a path to liberate the imaging of Black women and their bodies from centuries-long violence. While the artist may have titled a recent solo show at Stevenson: Cape Town “I’ve been here for days,” Orupabo chooses not to wait for days (let alone decades) for historical ills to be rectified, and instead proposes fantastic alternatives to the limited and exclusionary mainstream accounts of our communal past. She highlights the correlation between waiting and the legacies of subjugation-based structures such as colonialism and apartheid as they pertain to Black lives. Norwegian Nigerian artist Frida Orupabo grounds the act of waiting as an unacknowledged by-product of systematic exclusion, inequality, and displacement. But what I call “extreme waiting,” whether it is for basic state services and infrastructure or for fundamental rights like freedom, equality, or just a recognition of one’s humanity-in effect, waiting to matter-is a pain reserved for those forced to operate from the periphery. Waiting, whether in line or in the (dis)comfort of one’s home, is certainly not the sole domain of the structurally marginalized. Case in point: A walk or drive past predominantly Black neighborhoods will almost always reveal lengthy queues at underfunded clinics, hospitals, supermarkets, and financial institutions. This imbalance affects living conditions, quality of life, and access to resources. It’s been twenty-eight long transitional years, and yet a truly egalitarian South Africa remains but a dream, as Black South Africans still face systemic subjugation in a white-dominated economy. ![]() In 1995, the country officially celebrated its first Day of Reconciliation, marking the supposed unification of its Black and white populations following the demise of the apartheid regime and in the wake of the first democratic elections in April 1994. WAITING IS AN ACTIVITY familiar to most, but in South Africa it carries a particular charge. Frida Orupabo, Untitled, 2019, collage and paper pins mounted on aluminum, 52 × 48 3⁄8".
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