Fear of Fear
Fear of Fear
Fear of Fear is Frida Orupabo’s first exhibition in Mexico and will be shown at Galerie Nordenhake. It presents an installation of eight new human-sized collages, created by hand by the artist that will be exhibited in the main space of the gallery. In addition to this, the exhibition will be accompanied by three sculptures, as well as a monumental wallpaper that can be seen behind an installation of green curtains, and a video piece. The title of the exhibition is an allusion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film of the same name. Like the German film director, Orupabo creates complex characters, plagued by contradictions that together generate a melodramatic satire of modern society.
Frida Orupabo's paradigmatic work consists of groups of human-scale collages of fragments of Black bodies in black and white that the artist prints, cuts out and recomposes. Orupabo, being a Bblack artist born in Norway, has marked the lack of their representation in public images as the original motivation for her work.
Orupabo's figures carry the wounds of their origins. It is black and white photographic material – from a time prior to Technicolor and the civil rights movements – sourced from online archives for vintage fashion photoshoots, Renaissance paintings, the works of other contemporary artists and many other open sources. Orupabo uses the possibilities of dislocation and reassembly inherent in collage to relocate her figures in anachronistic situations, attire and poses. The figures are deformed, re-shaped and freed from the confines of their photographic character in a process that turns them into the enigmatic and sovereign protagonists of their own stories.
About the artist
Frida Orupabo was born 1986 in Sarpsborg, Norway, and lives and works in Oslo. Solo exhibitions include Fotomuseum 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 Okayama Art Summit (2022); the 34th São Paulo Biennial (2021) as well as the 58th Venice Biennale exhibition (2018). Together with Ming Smith and Missylanyus, Frida Orupabo presented her work in Arthur Jafa’s exhibition "A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions" at Moderna Museet in Stockholm and Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague (both 2019), Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin (2018), and Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London (2017).
Galerie Nordenhake
Monterrey 65. Roma Norte.
Mexico City, Mexico.
