Visit to ALL IS BROKEN IN THE NIGHT by Frida Orupabo at Galerie Nordenhake

“In her second solo exhibition at Galerie Nordenhake in Berlin, Frida Orupabo presents a new body of large-format prints, collages and sculptures, staged in two spatial room installations. Orupabo engages with archival practices and a therein lying power of images and speculation, that forcefully reflects onto questions of race, gender, identity, sexuality, the gaze and colonial violence.

Leveraging the vast spaces of the internet, Orupabo cuts, reassembles and layers found images to form collages as transformed bodies and contexts. Trained as a sociologist, the artist first started collecting and presenting a carefully crafted personal archive via her Instagram account @nemiepeba in the early 2010s, while employed at a centre for human trafficking and sex workers. Beginning with the family archive, the finds quickly expanded to include colonial archives as well as pop cultural contexts, some of which bear witness to the violence, racialisation and sexualisation of Black people. The artist creates her own narratives by way of manipulating an archival reality to oppose the lack of Black representation. Similar to how the cut-outs in the collage Inferno appear peephole-like, the freestanding sculpture On my Hands and Knees shows parts of a face as a three-leaf clover of the playing card colour cross. A shape that is also reminiscent of a keyhole. For Orupabo, ‘to create work that looks back at the viewer is a way to refuse to be made into an object, and to say, ‘I see you’.’ By experimenting with different modes of seeing and unseeing, she demands a way of actively looking at the work.” (Text excerpt from the press release by courtesy of Galerie Nordenhake)

More information on the Galerie Nordenhake Website.