Interview / Frida Orupabo

By Karolina Modig, journalist, author and Editor in Chief at Art Notes.

Exhibition
Frida Orupabo / On Lies, Secrets and Silence

KAROLINA MODIG: You have described what you do as putting different parts together to create new realities and new identities. It’s reminiscent of how you once described your own identity as a “slow construction” where you looked for parts that could create a whole. Is it your own identity building that forms the basis of your collages?

FRIDA ORUPABO: I’ve said that the act of reassembly can be an act of both healing and repair. For me, working with the visuals has been linked to both things. The work has been and still feels like a necessity, something I have to do. I often used the word sane – “I do it to stay sane.” And I do see it as something very closely linked to creating and sustaining a self, and ways of thinking. I think the collage form came very naturally to me because of my experiences growing up in Norway. I felt surrounded by whiteness. The access to images of people who weren’t white was very limited, so I was forced, in a way, to reimagine, manipulate and cut. The collage is important to me because it makes possible alternative ways of seeing and imagining. I like how quickly one can switch a meaning or an expression through the use of collage – by adding, removing or manipulating images or objects. I feel that the layering reveals complexities and contradictions – things that make us human, but which often are denied non-white people within Western discourses.

 KM: The gaze is central in your works. Why, and in what way?

FO: I guess the gaze has a strong presence in all of my works, I’m for the most part working with images where the subject gazes directly back at the spectator/viewer. It’s something about working with colonial archives which is so objectifying, so violent. The reversed gaze is important because to me it represents resistance and power. To look back is in a way to refuse objectification. It’s a way of speaking without sound.

 KM: Even though the gaze is often intense, it can be challenging to know for sure what emotion your characters are expressing, and it becomes especially ambiguous in relation to the bodies or body parts. Do you strive to create explicit expressions or rather keep them open to interpretation?

FO: I think I want it all – to create a clear expression or message, but also create works open to interpretations. I’m not sure, but I think that’s possible. What I do know is that if you don’t speak about and explain your own work, others will do it for you. That’s why I keep repeating the same thing about wanting to show complexities – to show women in pain, women that are vulnerable, women that show strength and wrath, delight, clarity … I want to say something about the interaction between past and present, between self-representation and imposed representation. The consequences of being “overdetermined from the outside”, “always placed as the other, never as the self”, as [the Portuguese artist] Grada Kilomba puts it. But also wanting to explore the possibility of resistance, and re-creation.

KM: Mothers and children are recurring themes, not least in the exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall. Many of your mothers have a seemingly unsentimental body language in relation to their child: they look away, hold the child a bit limply, and the positions of the children may have strange distortions. Can you tell us about your entry into the mother and child theme and their bond or relationship?

FO: I’ve always been interested in and worked with themes related to family relations, memory and generational trauma, and then especially the relationships between mothers and daughters.

Then I had my own daughters. I remember feeling a need to explore my own experiences and emotions that I hadn’t yet come to terms with. It made me think more deeply about motherhood and the expectations that follow, the roles you are given and what you actually feel. It also made me dive into different literature and testimonies from non-white women sharing their own experiences with the health care system, especially in regards to pregnancy, labour and mistreatment.

In my work, mothers hold their babies but sometimes they seem distant. Or in shock. Or they feel hostile, turning you, the onlooker, into an intruder. Sometimes they hold babies that are already grown. Other times it’s the babies that seem distanced or shocked. But there is joy too.

KM: You became an international name when Arthur Jafa invited you to participate in his exhibition A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions at the Serpentine North. When and how did he approach you?

FO: We had been following each other on Instagram for a while. His Instagram caught my attention because it had a big stream of found images. This was in the beginning of Instagram when the platform was pure and who you followed and their posts and likes were the only things you would see. I wasn’t familiar with Arthur’s own work before. He proposed a project that never happened and then some months later he invited me to make something for his solo show at Serpentine together with Ming Smith and Missylanyus. It all felt very unreal.

KM: I found a conversation between you and Jafa on the Galerie Nordenhake website. He asks if you see yourself as an artist, which you say you don’t and that you wouldn’t call what you do art. Do you still think that? Can you tell us what you think about the concepts of artist and art concerning yourself and what you do?

FO: I still struggle with those terms. I guess it’s a bit of an inferiority complex, because I came in from the back door. And because I had a completely different full-time job for such a long time. Also, because I’ve always made visuals in different forms, out of personal necessity, long before anyone came and labelled it “art”. If someone ask me what I do for a living today, I say I’m an artist, so I guess I’ve gotten more used to it by now, but it still feels a bit strange.

KM: I’ve understood that you started with collage in your twenties, and then mostly worked with images of yourself and your family. Why did you go from that to “unknown” faces and bodies?

FO: I was looking at my own family history and memories, going through family albums and making use of the images I found there. I used collage the same way as I do now – to recreate and manipulate memories and stories. I did that for a couple of years, until it didn’t feel important anymore. It was also the result of a lack of access to public images and archives. I think I started to work with found material as soon as I had an internet connection at home as a student.

KM: In one of the catalogue essays, names such as bell hooks, Judith Butler, and Toni Morrison are mentioned. What do those names mean to you – in life and in this exhibition? 

FO: I often mention and salute bell, Toni and Grada Kilomba as thinkers that made life easier and sweeter, because they helped me sort things out that had been blurry. These women changed me on a deeper level and helped me to see and make sense of a lot that I previously had lacked a language for. Their ways of seeing and their words are always with me when I work.

KM: Is there any subject that you cover in more detail in this exhibition than you have done before?

FO: I’m not sure. I started out with a dollhouse for this exhibition. Usually, I make a collage a starting point and then I build up the exhibition around that one collage. I’m interested in houses – the physicality, the shape, objects within it, how things are arranged, which bodies inhabit the space and what type of activities happen there. Then, further, I’m interested in how the home and the primary socialization shape us – in terms of how we see, act and think. I guess these questions often show up in my work, but I’ve been thinking of children more than before. The next generations in relation to the state of the world – which is quite depressing to put it mildly.

KM: You show completely new works staged as spatial installations. How did you approach this exhibition, and what did you want to do new, in material/physical terms?

FO: I came across an image online. It was a room filled with pedestals of different heights. It was beautiful. Like a landscape or a friendly labyrinth, and it made me want to jump inside. I was thinking that I would like to recreate that. It made me think of the title of this hymn “How did you feel when you come out of the wilderness”. My mind was on the Wilderness. Landscape and labyrinths. I imagined how works and people would disappear and pop up as I moved into and through the space. I think this is how I often end up working. Either with curtains or within the works themselves – hiding, camouflaging, reappearing.

KM: We get to meet two large-scale women, Big Girl I and Big Girl II, your largest works to date. Can you tell us how your thoughts about scale and size went?

FO: I wanted people to feel small once they entered the main room. And I wanted to create a collage that was impossible to miss once you entered the space. Because of the size, but also because of the eye contact you’ll have with her, no matter where you are in the room. There are two big girls. One looks away while the other confronts you. I wanted them to take up space … to make the space theirs.

KM: The title of the exhibition is On Lies, Secrets and Silence. Where does it come from, and what’s it about?

FO: The exhibition’s title is taken from a prose collection by [the poet, essayist, and feminist Adrienne Rich. It’s a great title and it made me think about all kinds of stuff. Mostly about childhood, the lies we tell others and ourselves, the silence and secrets and how it shapes us. In a conversation about the book she said, “Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language – this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.” I’ve been thinking a lot about her words and their importance.

KM: Do you still have a studio at home? 

FO: Yes, I still work from home. I’m a home person. It’s very peaceful and I like to live and be near my work. It’s what makes most sense to me.

KM: The collages are black and white with elements of pale colour. Previously, your Instagram feed would often contain images in dirty pastel colours with hints of red. Not so much anymore. Do the colours have a symbolic meaning, or is it about something else?

FO: It depends. Since I often use images from old archives they’re often in black and white or sepia. I find colours difficult, both in regards to aesthetics and what it might symbolize.

I sometimes work with colours purely aesthetically while other times, for instance for my show After hours held in Johannesburg at Stevenson Gallery (2020), the colours had a meaning. The show dealt with themes related to pregnancy and labour, and so the use of light colours – light pink, light green, were associated with different body fluids. For me it was also the colours I felt smelled. I wanted that for the exhibition – to give it a sense of smell.

KM: The pins that hold the pieces together in your collages make the figures look like cut-out dolls. In recent years, you have also worked with materials such as aluminium. What do the form and materials mean to you?

FO: Yes, in the last couple of years I’ve tested prints on different materials, such as metal, wood and now also fabric, with the exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall. I like the different feel it gives the images. Once I look at an image or a digital collage, I’ll already know what type of material it should be printed onto. It’s hard to explain why, some images just feel soft while others feel hard and should therefore be transformed into metal or wood. The use of metal also came as a solution for a wish to make works that could be placed in the middle of a room. I wanted the expression to be confrontational, hard, unmovable, heavy. Not only because of the sculpture’s gaze but in its physicality.

KM: The exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall focuses on complex relationships within the home and the thin boundaries between security and insecurity, comfort and discomfort. These are subjects you’ve worked with before, how do you deal with them here?

FO: I think these questions or themes will feel different because of the different ways it will be shown. I feel like the different mediums – film, sculpture, collage – and the installation with the towering pedestals gives a more intense experience because of the way each work is placed in relation to one another. It’s almost how I work on my Instagram where each post has its own meaning, but together they create a more complex narrative or dialogue – which is the conversation I want to have. So, you have layers of conversations on top of one another, that might or might not make sense.

Image: Frida Orupabo, On Lies, Secrets and Silence, 2024. Photo: Jean-Baptiste Béranger, Bonnier Konsthall

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